A Full Life

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Category: Recovery

  • West Lands

    When I sit down to write fictional stories, the setting is always the same, and the setting is way out west in California. I don’t know other places well enough, and even if I grow to, which I might now that I live in the Midwest, my bones quite literally grew to their capacity in…

  • And I Will Tell About It

    What do we share when we stop hiding ourselves away? This is, of course, the internet, social media, the shame over guilt culture of appearance and perfection, and in these realms we skirt the truth, muddy it up, maybe forgo it all together. What happens when we decide, I’m going to share it? We’re free.…

  • How to move to a new city, get pregnant, get married, and not take Valium

    Imagine you meet a man (or woman) who you know you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life with, (and how do you know this? Well, you don’t entirely, but you just sort of feel it, you know you can tell this person the truth and look ugly in front of him and even…

  • The Relief of Vulnerability

    Note: As I share this I realize there are multiple layers to the vulnerability I am speaking about, and here are two – the actual act of being vulnerable with my husband that you are to read about read below, and the vulnerability of writing it down and sharing it on my blog and social…

  • Could You Be Loved

    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…

  • the story and The Story 

    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…

  • Unmapped

    Unmapped

    “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…

  • The Loss of Anger

    “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…

  • Disarm

    Dian Fossey, famous zoologist and anthropologist, who spent an extensive amount of time studying gorillas in their natural habitat, came to understand that the best way to approach the magnificent creatures was without weapons of any kind. It was a daring undertaking – gorillas are potentially dangerous; no doubt their strength and size could cause…

  • New

    When I was seventeen, I got black out drunk on New Years Eve and found myself in a precarious sexual encounter with a man who I thought was my friend. I went numb after. It was 2003. Endless tequila shots by the wet bar before the party, to steady the nerves. I was toast.  My life…