“True love is born from understanding.” ~Buddha I believe one of our strongest desires in life is to feel understood. We want to know that people see our good intentions and not only get where we’re coming from but get us. We want to know they see us. They recognize the thoughts, feelings, and struggles that underlie our choices,…
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” ~Wendell Berry I was watching television one night when something on the screen made me set everything aside and go still. It was a…
Many years ago, I clearly remember celebrating a strange victory. I had only spent one day overthinking a problem. I was triggered by the end of another situationship. I could feel them pulling away. Something had changed, but I didn’t have the answers. I was stuck in that painful limbo space. For that day, I had done what I…
“The heart that’s been through the most can sometimes mistake chaos for connection.” ~Unknown I remember the exact moment I knew something was wrong. We had been talking for three weeks. Every conversation left me either floating or deflated, never just… okay. Either he said something that made me feel like the most understood person on earth or he…
“Expectation is the root of all heartache.” ~William Shakespeare I turned forty this year. And I am only now figuring out something I wish someone had told me at twenty. Most of my pain—the kind that sat in my chest for days, the kind that made me replay conversations at 2 a.m., the kind that made me wonder what…
I used to think I was just bad at coping with stress. Every Sunday evening, I felt anxious about the week ahead. My chest would tighten when certain emails appeared in my inbox. Before meetings, I’d rehearse what I wanted to say over and over, trying to avoid saying the wrong thing. At the time, I blamed myself. I…
“A codependent person is one who has let another person’s behavior affect him or her and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior.” ~Melody Beattie From a young age, I felt insecure in my own skin. I was a highly sensitive child and, subsequently, struggled with low self-worth for most of my life. Although I had many friends…
“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” ~François de La Rochefoucauld “So, in your relationship, do your partner’s needs always dictate how things go?” My therapist looked at me quizzically after I’d just shared with him that our dinner plans had suddenly changed the night before because my…
There is a famous Latin phrase that I absolutely love: Carpe diem. It means “Seize the day.” Younger people might be more familiar with the phrase “You only live once,” or YOLO. Both phrases encourage people to live their lives to the fullest. I have struggled with depression and anxiety since my childhood, making it difficult to live by…
“Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.” ~Henry David Thoreau I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I was standing just outside the circle. Not always, but whenever I stepped back and looked at the whole of my life, the thread running through has been a sense of being on the outside looking in….
