“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” ~Søren Kierkegaard A few years ago, I was catching up over coffee with an old friend I’ll call Ray, a trusted mentor. He’s a few years older than me, silver-haired and down to earth, the kind of man who listens with his whole heart. We were at…
“The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” ~Oprah Winfrey My father died at forty-nine. I was young when it happened, still soft in the way grief makes you when you are not yet equipped to hold it. I was so consumed by the loss itself that I never stopped to do the…
“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.” ~Doug Larson I don’t miss Zinia. I miss the Zinia I made up. The real Zinia—the one who fought with me for hours over things that became bigger than they should have, who said things I told myself I’d never forgive, who was wrong for…
“Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.” ~Pema Chödrön Evicted. The word stared up at me from the letter in my hands. It was the summer of 2022, near the tail end of the Covid pandemic, when life was…
“When we avoid difficult conversations, we trade short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction.” ~Peter Bromberg Have you ever looked around at other people’s lives and wondered, “How do they do that?” How do they seem so steady, so connected, so… together? From where I stood, there appeared to be a certain kind of person—someone confident, kind, thoughtful, and at ease…
“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.” ~Hermann Hesse My dad was intubated, so he couldn’t say the words back to me. I told him I loved him anyway. Instead, he slowly pointed to himself and then to me. “You love me too?” I asked. His eyes widened ever so slightly,…
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” ~Anne Lamott You know that familiar routine: an exhausting day at work, a long commute, children, errands, messages, dinner, and notifications. And then—finally—rest at the end of it all. A soft, welcoming couch that curves in all the right places. A new episode of…
“It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day, that’s the hard part.” ~ BoJack Horseman If you’d told eighteen-year-old me where she’d be at twenty-eight, she would have laughed nervously and changed the subject. That was her move, by the way. Laugh it off. Deflect. Eat another biscuit. She was…
“Love life more than the meaning of it? Yes, certainly.” ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov When I was a child, there was a special moment during dusk when the old sodium lanterns switched on in the streets, morphing the world from one of saturation into one of yellow monochrome, and it always made me sad. One such day, my dad…
“True belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world. Our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” ~Brené Brown For years, I felt like I was always one step behind everyone else. Not in a way I could prove. Not something visible or measurable. It was quieter than that—persistent,…
