Summer 2017 For the past week I've been playing on repeat Lorde's fantastic sophomore album Melodrama, and though I'm not exactly twenty years old and not exactly a famous singer/songwriter and not exactly partying in clubs any longer to tend to broken-hearted wounds, I know to the bones what she has written and recorded and…
Continue reading ➞ The Loneliness of Aloneness/The Taboo of Needing/ (The Irony of this Post)
George Bernard Shaw wrote, "if you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you best teach it to dance." Oh how some of us toil to be rid of our pasts or our character flaws or our deepest, darkest secrets. Maybe instead, we ought to hang out and have a little fun with…
.. a (semi) fiction short .. My first complaint was that Jim didn’t hold my hand in the back of the cab. Granted, he had already held other parts of me (and held them pretty well) but we were dressed in our finest - he in a nice grey suit and navy tie, me in…
When you first start feeling less afraid, you want someone to pinch you. Is this real? And do I deserve it? After the exhaustive stretch of hyper-vigilance and over the shoulder gazing, of expecting lurking danger at every turn, the realm of trust and serene neutrality can feel like a trick. Sleight of hand only,…
In the wake of tales of you I root for you, I love you You you you you I met my first serious boyfriend when I was nineteen and roughing it in rehab. Relax. It's not as dirty as it sounds. Nick was a southern gentleman from the outskirts of Atlanta. The first time he…
Long before I set out on a spiritual path of recovery, I felt some sort of kinship with some great beyond. Even as a child who had little interest in Sunday school and no discernible relationship with God in a religious sense, I prayed all the time. I prayed out loud before I went to bed…
When I first began my teaching career in 2011, I prided myself on two things: my ability to connect with students and my classroom management. I wasn't always the best lesson planner or designer of rubrics, and I certainly wasn't always fired up about professional development and the state of education, but I could create…
Continue reading ➞ When the Rug is Pulled: Humility, Identity, and Other Such Things
"The stable solution is the individual who tells the truth." Like any relatively young person stumbling along and thirsting to learn, there is plenty that I don't know and understand. Because I tend to write so personally and from direct experience, much of what I state on here vacillates and changes. As I have grown up…
"When you're getting better, it's a jagged line." -Jenny Lewis Maybe it's just what happens in your mid twenties, but shit, I highly doubt it - there was this black jumprope I had tangled up with the wires of an old Nintendo 64 shoved deep into my closet, and for a year I imagined it…
"I never get angry. I grow a tumor instead." -Woody Allen As a child in the nineties, I idolized women who were angry and restless and lived to write and sing their fury. Fiona Apple, Gwen Stefani, Erykah Badu, Alanis Morrissette, Lauryn Hill, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Shirley Manson - even Madonna (before she became an enlightened…
A Full Life 