“I once heard someone say that a sign of enlightenment was the ability to say (and mean it) ‘Well, this isn’t what I want, but it’s what I got, so okay.’” ~Sylvia Boorstein I once met a speed-cuber, one of those people who could solve a Rubik’s Cube in sixty seconds. Nice friendly young guy. I hated him. Not…
“Sometimes the hardest challenge isn’t receiving acceptance from God or other people; it’s receiving acceptance from ourselves.” ~Leigh Finke, Queerfully and Wonderfully Made Growing up as a pastor’s kid, I had to hide who I was. I was taught that love from parents was conditional. I was taught that mistakes were met with a strict hand and harsh words….
On August 22, 2018, my husband collapsed in our bedroom. Rudy was my best friend and my partner in every sense of the word. His last word was “911.” I performed CPR while my youngest daughter and my father-in-law stood nearby, and my oldest daughter shielded our four-year-old in another room. The EMTs worked on him before taking him…
“We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.” ~Albert Schweitzer I pick up my phone even though it has not made a sound. No missed calls. No new messages. No invitation asking what I am doing or whether I would like to come over. I put it down, but before long I check again….
When I was little, I often felt as though I lived in two completely different worlds. My parents’ home was like an ice castle. Everything looked beautiful. Everything was orderly. Everything appeared exactly as it was supposed to. But it was cold. My mother rarely let me do what I genuinely wanted to do. Instead, I was expected to…
“Being easy to please is often mistaken for having no needs at all.” ~Unknown We’d been together four years when my husband turned to me in the car and asked, completely out of nowhere, “What’s your favorite color?” I laughed, assuming he was joking. He wasn’t. “I’m serious,” he said. “I realized I don’t actually know. I know mine’s…
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” ~Toni Morrison, Beloved My father was on the other side of my bedroom door, banging hard on it with the flat of his hand, screaming at me to get back to the table and finish my plate. I told him there was no way I was going anywhere near my sister…
In 2014, at the age of thirty-one, I was told that I might soon have serious difficulty walking. For months, my body had been sending me signals I did not understand. I experienced numbness, vertigo, falls, loss of coordination, difficulty reading, disorientation, bladder problems, and other neurological symptoms. I would walk down the street and suddenly lose my balance….
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.” ~Carl Rogers For over a year, I woke up at 3 a.m. almost every night. I would lie there in the dark, my heart pounding, my mind sprinting through the same loop: What if I can’t handle my job? What if I lose…
In my second year of Ayurvedic medical school, my eyes started burning around nine o’clock every night. I did what most students do. I rubbed them, blinked hard a few times, and went back to the screen. Exams were close. The lecture slides were on my laptop, the reference texts were PDFs, and the practice questions were on my…
