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…
Tag: healing
Sacred
The little baby boy still growing strong in my belly is due to greet the world in exactly eleven days. He's kicking me in the ribs as we speak. He might come tonight. Or next weekend. Or in two weeks. (I'm predicting June 8th.) I conceived this child in the middle of September 2017, found…
love, enough
[fiction short] An hour before I am supposed to leave, I start crying. I've had that fluttery, controlling, rigidity-soaked fear for two days now, and underneath that there are always two forms of grief - the actual grief, which hurts, and the tender grief about being so hard on myself, that the New Age Buddhists call radical…
Squeaky Clean
I can remember the first time I felt truly clean, and I think I went off and wrote a poem about waterfalls and the color blue. Nerd. I was trying my best to express what it meant, that feeling of a freshly scrubbed inner space. Like linens washed in lavender water, or what I imagine a…
To Thine Own Self, Be True AF
My guess is that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be all about not giving a fuck what others thought. (You know, in the healthy, anti-codependent, non-sociopathic way.) Let me declare, just to gain even more credibility here, that I used to be sort of obsessed with astrology. Give me a break, I was fifteen. And though I…
I’m Serious!
You might not believe this, but I used to take myself very seriously. If you had suffered the way I had, well, then you would not be laughing at my tears. (Or drinking them, like Jessica Valenti.) I mean, my mom told me I was bad at soccer! My dad was too busy working to hug…
Little Children
How often I feel like a confused child, looking skyward for guidance, desperately wanting to be told, "this is why things are the way that they are. This is what you must do." There is no such explicit guidance, except maybe in a god or higher power, but even from that we are never really…
Transportation
Nothing transports like a song. Nothing evokes such memory. Like Proust's famous madeleines, the hearing of one song has transported me back twelve years and sixty-two miles away, to a world I no longer inhabit, to best friends and lovers I no longer know, to places I will probably never see again. At nineteen I bought…
The Thinker
"The less I think, the more I love." -My friend I have come to trust, despite dubious moments, that there is no solution in rough and tough self-talk and obsessive thinking. You know. The thinking that warns and threatens. That runs the black and white tapes of rigidity and scarcity. The bad girl tales. Those are beyond…
Miracle
If you have ever had an eating disorder, then you know. You understand what it feels like to be consumed with thoughts of food and weight at every moment. You know the calorie count of every single item at the store, and if you don't, you could probably venture a guess. You know the fear…
A Full Life 