When I first started to write this post, I ended up checking Facebook.
Mindfulness is popular. As a concept, term, and (sometimes) a practice, it’s grown rapidly in popularity the last few years. Google trends shows this steady increase in attention over the last few years: (read more…)
You may know FOMO, or fear of missing out. It’s that feeling you get when a friend suggests that you take a trapeze class. It sounds horrible to you and you dread going, but you don’t want everyone else to do it without you and the fear of missing out wins over your fear of falling off the trapeze.
It’s easy to be disappointed as a mother.
We spend most of our “free” time doing things for our children, or making sure other people — our spouse or partner, nanny or daycare provider — do those things. While some of these tasks are rewarding, most of them aren’t very gratifying. We don’t often hear from our families that we did a good job cleaning the house, doing the laundry, or juggling making dinner with driving carpools.
In my first year as a new mother seventeen years ago, I was often disappointed. (read more…)
For a high school video production class, I hosted a live TV segment that was broadcast on our local cable channel. I sat at a desk in our little makeshift news studio to report on a popular security guard at the school and his impact on students’ day-to-day lives. Other students adjusted the cameras and made sure the sound levels were right. At 10:30 am on the dot, we went live. I still vividly remember the feeling of getting the first few lines out coherently, and then…
NOTHING.
It felt like someone hit the eject button on my brain and everything emptied out instantaneously. (read more…)
I don’t have a memory of love before I was twenty one.
True, I grew up in a close-knit family where the words “I love you” were regularly spoken. But, for me it was a statement of fact or obligation. It was not the joyous, deep body feeling that I now know as love.
The person I dated for a over a year in college was rightfully angry that I told my friends and family that I loved them, but I never said it to her. It is only in hindsight that I see how immature I was. I didn’t know what love was really, what it felt like, or that I was responsible for it. I thought it was a thing that would simply come to me, like Tinker Bell, and sprinkle me with a magical dust. I worried that I would never love someone, that something was wrong with me that rendered me undatable and incapable of love. For years, I was comforted by Melissa Ferrick’s “Love Song.” She sings: “How strange at twenty one, never even had one.” If Melissa Ferrick felt this way too, maybe I was ok. (read more…)
