On Christmas Eve, I sat around the table with my parents and learned more about where I come from. Not just about their childhoods, but my grandparents’ too. I heard about great-uncles I didn’t know I had, twins I didn’t know existed. The more I heard, the more my eyes started to bug out and [...]
2015
I would say the driving question of my life is, “Why?” I want to know the reason behind everything and in particular why things are the way they are, or why they happened. Part of it is because I’m a curious person (I am a journalist after all), but another part is because uncertainty and [...]
Sometimes I get in a nihilistic mood and think it doesn’t really matter that I’m alive, that I exist. In the grand scheme of things, I’m a speck, a peon, a flash in the pan of life. Furthermore, I think of myself as expendable and exchangeable in the sense that if I wasn’t here, someone [...]
One of the things I’m working on in therapy is self-trust. It’s particularly hard because I point to all the times I acted on my intuition and things didn’t work out the way I thought they would, as evidence why I shouldn’t trust myself. All of this is made more complicated by the fact I [...]
Recently, I had an interaction with a man online who professed his love for me before we’d even spoken on the telephone, skyped, or met in person. I recognized in him similar qualities in myself, which is to say “falling in love,” before getting to know a person, and making that person my everything. Reading [...]
The other day, my brother told me he boils down his spiritual practice to two tenets: meditate, and be a good person. That got me thinking, what does it mean to be a good person? Some people say being a good person means following the 10 commandments: don’t steal, kill anybody, or commit adultery, to [...]
The other day I had a conversation with my friend and neighbor about how I’m constantly seeking love from the “other.” And what I’m still learning is how to give love to myself and be OK with my own company. She reminded me while it’s true it’s important to love ourselves, it’s also important to [...]
The Thursday before Halloween I pinched a nerve. A friend massaged my neck and shoulders on Saturday and Sunday, which helped, but what really gave me full range of motion was rage. On Monday, I started thinking about that quote I posted last week, about how nothing in this universe happens unless God desires it, [...]
Earlier this week I cried after watching this clip of Marianne Williamson. I want to do what she’s doing, which is traveling around the world and inspiring people, but it’s clear to me that now is not the time. My health will not allow me to travel all over creation and speak to large crowds. [...]
I spent my formative years in the mountains of North Carolina. A place so rural I couldn’t see our closest neighbors and people burned their trash or buried it because trash pickup didn’t exist and they couldn’t be bothered to head to the dump. I used to take walks on the mountain behind our house [...]
