personal
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The other day, I learned that a VA was having a milestone birthday that’s way in my past, and I messaged a smutty colleague: “Tell me I’m not too old to be doing this.” My bio says that I am GenX, and that identifies me as older than most of the female VAs I’m aware…
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I’ve been thinking about places. I’ve been thinking about how places hold memories of sense and feeling. There was a big old maple tree behind my childhood home, part of an abandoned farm. The ghost of a barn lay crumbling there, along with the rusty skeleton of an old VW bug. I was afraid to…
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Back in January, a friend of mine reminded our social media community of the concept of a word for the year, and I decided to choose “bloom.” To bloom is to come to life after sleeping, hibernating, resting. Blooming is the culmination of growth, the flowering a powerful display of the plant’s beauty and power.…
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Full disclosure: this is the second time in my life I’ve written a piece with this title. The first was when I was 20 and writing for the student newspaper at my university. I was single and bitter about it, but having been a romantic since my early days, I wanted to mark the occasion.…
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The temptation to remake myself every new year is strong. I love the idea of fresh starts. New notebooks, a fresh stack of paper, a new pen, a clean slate. Leave who you are in the old year and begin again. Be whoever you wish you could be. Fix whatever is wrong with you. But…
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I rarely get called [real name]. I don’t know why, but it has always been the case. Even my parents don’t call me by my name. My mother has been calling me “chicken,” for as long as I can remember. Other people close to me call me a variety of nicknames. It may be because…
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If there is a word I would take out of our collective vocabulary, it would be should. Should is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. He should have treated me better. (Absolutely, and yet he didn’t.) We shouldn’t have to do this. (Nope, and yet we do.) I shouldn’t have to tell you I don’t like that. (Maybe,…
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Remember when gratitude journals were all the rage? If you just think of 3 things you’re grateful for every day, you’ll notice the change in your life. I think the idea was to train yourself to see the positives (I wrote about this in Glimmers). I tried this practice for a while, but no amount…
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It’s a major tenet of Buddhism, as I understand it, that suffering is caused by resistance. Accept what is happening to and around you, and move in strength from there. So often your brain tells you “No, it can’t be true that X is happening,” when in fact, X is very much happening. X is…
Pretty Lynne Writes 