At a very tense Mother’s Day gathering in 2016, I learned that my niece’s graduation was less than four weeks away and on the same night as a concert I had already committed to. The tickets had been a Valentine’s
Something does not become untrue because somebody more influential tells the story differently. I have spent a lot of my life attempting to reconcile the version of events that prevailed with my lived experience. Influence seems to determine which version
I’ve been thinking about my ability to participate safely in relationships which are non-essential and technically intended as sources of safe, healthy connection. Some discord is guaranteed. But sustained and avoided discord is too much for my nervous system. I
For more than 40 years, I didn’t really know how to exist inside a relationship unless I was the broken one, bowing in reliance to anyone gracious enough to let me hang around, no matter the quality of treatment. Could
There is a scene in Boardwalk Empire in which a priest is standing in a river performing a baptism. He is wearing white robes. He is smiling. He occupies a position of moral authority. He presents as a good man offering salvation.
Memory Memory can be unreliable. Interpretation certainly is. Two people can experience the same interaction and leave with very different narratives about what happened. What feels more meaningful to me now is paying attention to patterns that could have been
The Reality of Gossip Discussing the details of someone else’s life—their hardships, their choices, or how they live—is a fundamentally unwholesome practice. Gossip happens, and we can be honest about that and not pretend that engaging in it is useful,
The Binary The archetypes seem to move through life inside a rigid binary: winners and losers, heroes and villains, right and wrong. In their accounting for outcomes, there seems a lacking awareness for the possibility of their own poor decisions,