When you hit your 50’s, Jenny Joseph’s red hat poem helps. You start thinking about who you are and hitting life head-on, unapologetically.

You’re in your second half of life and a seize-the-day-mentality helps fortify the vulnerability that comes with that.

Why waste time feeling bad about being imperfectly human when you can embrace it and thrive?

My Self-Worth Isn’t Defined by My Social Network

How I view friends has therefore changed. For decades, I thought I should have more.

I lived with a pervading sense that to be me was to be lonely. …

Even though I was feeling sick and going through a fatigue spike yesterday, I’m feeling bad for having spent my time binge-watching Pose on Netflix rather than reading or writing.

So, when I got up this morning and saw Dan Friedman’s awesome book list for the year, I immediately Googled, “how to be well-read.” I found a nice post about it too, which makes me happy.

Reading About Reading

This private ritual of reading about reading is habitual and it’s something that I hope will continue to shift as I heal. …

I find myself quoting Shakespeare a lot lately, and I’m probably not the only one.

Whether it’s the Bard, the Bible, or your Bubbie, everyone needs wisdom these days.

What We Are Mourning

When the pandemic started, there was a spate of articles about mourning the loss of our current reality and adapting to the slow-motion, ongoing crisis. I recently did a quick search, expecting to see a revival of that topic since we’re about to close out the year. I haven’t seen much, so I figured I’d chime in.

It’s a new decade but also a new epoch that has yet to be…

Obstacles and Motives Pave My Compassionately Boundaried Way

In Cup 1, I described my decades long intransigent addiction to coffee. A cup a day is fine for many, but while healing from a boatload of chronic conditions, it’s not fine for me.

The definition of addiction includes knowing something isn’t good for you and doing it anyway, despite your highest wishes. Compulsive use despite knowledge of harm. I hate to say it, coffee, but that’s you and me.

I’ve explored my motives, both for and against coffee, multiple times. Being on an elimination diet for years still hasn’t eliminated my…

Describing the problem: To be the change, let’s first see the struggle.

With the holidays comes hedonism, and with hedonism comes guilt. Between toxic positivity and biting despair, this year is likely worse.

Compassion is the best, and perhaps only, response. As we ring out the old to bring in the new, it helps to see the struggle while we seek to be the change.

At least, that’s what I think. My coffee addiction intransigence is decades old, the last in a line of struggle that went from smoking cigarettes to consuming sugar, to coffee and caffeine. Having seen friends…

Chronic Fatigue: The Challenge of Being Well

On the spectrum from healing to whole

I woke up not waking up, like usual, feeling a sense of dread about how the day was meant to go. I am supposed to rest, to be productive, and to find some mythical, intentional, liminal space between the two. To tread the line between resting, in order to avoid post-exertional malaise, and exercising, in order to avoid deconditioning which will also make me more fatigued.

Why is the onus so much on us, the sufferers of this damned condition? By the time you are calling it chronic fatigue syndrome, you’re likely to…

Everything about my recent transition to unemployment and homeschooling is disorienting, including how I define myself. I’ve worked since I was legally able, always with a focus on earning. That is, until a month ago.

And now, in the day to day of my intricate, intentional task management system, my efficiency mindset is confounded. I don’t know how to define myself.

Fifty seven years after Betty Friedan called the malaise of white middle class housewives “the problem with no name,” we still need clarity of nomenclature.

First, I was a WAHM

I was a “working mom” my daughter’s whole life. I took three months of…

I’ve tried at times to explain my medical history to Mexican healthcare providers or to share my fertility story in passing conversations, but I haven’t had the right Spanish words for dilation and curettage. ‘Dilitación y legrado’ or ‘dilitación y raspado,’ Google Translate tells me.

Communicating via Google Translate is like using a condom. A film between me and the rest of humanity blocking the fullness of my creation from touching others. Dissatisfying, but my words still do get through. …