writing

  • Your Red Rubber Ball

    The world will wear you down.  It will teach you that you’re not smart enough, not pretty enough, not the right skin colour, not the right gender or sexuality, not good enough at your job. It will teach you that you should do your laundry differently, grow grass in your front yard, wear the right…

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  • How Old is Too Old?

    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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  • This Must Be The Place

    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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  • Bloom

    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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  • New Year, Old Me

    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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  • Tend Your Garden

    There are days when my garden is sunny and green. The flowers in the corner are bright pink; I planted them there the first time I had something published and people called me a writer. Some sunflowers in the side yard by the fence are a compliment someone paid me about my sunny personality. The…

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  • Do It Scared

    I’ve been sitting in the dark for the last half an hour or so, frozen. I have a bunch of things to do, some of which are work and some of which are fun, but I can’t move.  Tomorrow I am going to do a very big thing. It doesn’t really matter what it is.…

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  • Should

    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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  • As Pretty Lynne, I usually write about things when they are going well, or when I’ve got it all figured out. Today is a little bit different.  Most days, I feel great about being a single woman. I am smart and capable and can figure out how to do things I haven’t had to do…

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  • Blocked

    I had a confusing thing happen recently and I wanted to write about it.  An individual responded to a story of mine on Instagram with a note that they clicked on the Reddit link in my profile and were “not sorry. Amazing work.”  We had a very pleasant and superficial exchange about my writing, and…

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