personal
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Caution: This is a Vulnerable Post If you’ve read enough of my blog you’ll figure out that I am single after a long relationship. Twenty-eight years long, as a matter of fact. We lived together for most of my adult life. Living on my own has been a wonderful experience in some ways. I am…
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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…