What is wrong with us? I heard resilience described the other day as a coat hanger. Or rather, we are the coat hanger who gets bent out of shape; the coat hanger’s structural ability to be bent back into shape is what we call resilience. […]
All posts filed under: creative nonfiction
The wisdom of trivia
Mom always goes first. She’s spent time — who knows, maybe all week — getting organized for her Saturday Zoom share and needs to get it out there before she loses her train of thought. We are scrupulous in getting right to her once everyone […]
Tapping into our deep stories
Deep stories, the ones we tell about ourselves that keep us stuck in a different point in time…that is the stuff of therapy, for sure, but it’s also the stuff of a technique called tapping. Tapping is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: you […]
Jasper’s This-Is-Good moment
Jasper is a jail-break kind of dog that slips his leash or digs his way to freedom, however the opportunity may present itself. Pam is a 60-year-old “I’m-on-it” sort of woman who drops her bike on the sidewalk to chase down neighborhood dogs on the […]
Bread in one hand; grief in the other
A while back I asked my sister if she was exhibiting any weird behaviors that could be associated with the pandemic. She gave it some fair thought and said not really. Like many folks here,* she’s a leader in a healthcare system and has been […]
Down to the bone
After raising 5 kids and packing them off to college, my cousin Karen cut her hair, threw a few things in a backpack and trekked around Europe for a while on her own. I was floored. No make-up? No blow dryer? That someone could travel […]
Our primal relationship with numbers
Judging from how many articles there are out there with headlines like, “The 8 Top Anti-Inflammatory Foods for Anxiety” and, “The Only 5 Things You Need to Live a Good Life,” we appear to be in love with numbers. We just are. In fact, they […]
Respectable you
I went to work on Monday, March 16th. About 2 o’clock that afternoon my manager called to say it’s happening; pack up your laptop and go home. In the span of about a minute I became an instant remote employee along with many other people. […]
What’s really going on in our mind
I have bipolar. However, what I’m really having a harder time reconciling about myself is being one of those people with bad allergies. Honestly, I just finished coughing my way through the last 8 weeks because I wasn’t going to be a person with allergies […]
Unleashed
There is something in us that comes out when the environment changes, like that funny thing that always happened in school when the power went off. Under cover of darkness, mild mayhem would erupt. We would all start ooooohing and shouting. Excited tusseling would break out. It was like […]
Be cool
She fell a little too much in love with me so I had to dump her, but it could just as easily have been me falling in love with her. This story is about what it takes for us to do what we do. Oh […]
Leaving your mark
There is a lady who walks her dog on State Street in Portland every day. When she gets to Mercy Hospital, she takes a little detour so she can place a painted rock on the hospital’s front entrance steps or the guardrail going down to […]
Be cool. 