Seeking My Balance

I walked down the alter at 23 years old. 70+ people were there to support us, but one single question perched on their lips. “Will this couple be another statistic?” 60% of marriages between people aged 20-25 end in divorce. But my mom and her mom married even younger (and stayed together), so this must […]

Okay, so the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Kind of. Made you look?

As a follow-up to the question: Haven’t I suffered enough? It’s been about 3 weeks of convincing myself to take a mood stabilizer – and life is quite different and also the same. That’s kind of the odd thing. I think I expected horrible side effects with no or, conversely, dramatic benefits (but would need […]

Stories are not facts or fiction. They are all valid, but none are fully truth or lies. I start with this because I fully recognize that my stories about my ex husband, my current partner, myself, my friends and family, and everything and everyone in my life is a *story.* I am a skeptic about […]

I went to a psychiatrist for the first time since essentially high school. I have a history of poor compliance with drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier because I fear that I will lose the essence of me or that it will trigger even more destabilization in my brain and general health. I’m also super […]

This weekend, I listened to an amazing talk for the hospice volunteer crew about witnessing loss. It wasn’t at all what I thought it would be, to be honest. It was amazingly poignant and spoke to my soul. It made me realize how far I’ve come in sitting with loss – at least of others. […]

In almost 2 years of cuddling, I can now pick my cuddle clients out of a crowd. It makes me sad…but it also makes me feel like maybe there is a way to help, a standard we as cuddlers and as humans could follow and bring much of the touch-deprived population out of the caves […]

Where has vulnerability gotten me? To you. To me. To everyone.   But then? When i “have” something to lose? That is when vulnerability is painful, risky. This is when my demons come out.   I am loss-averse, not risk-averse. I am pain-averse, not love-averse. But they are intertwined, from the same origin.   And […]

I am an iceberg. What you see on the outside is only the tip – and an illusion at that. I am solitary or bunched with others like me. I am bright in the dark and darker in the light. I am a product of my environment. Without certain specific conditions, I am nothing, non-existent. […]

When I was a kid, I had a recurring nightmare about speed. A bunny going very fast bounding towards me. I only knew it was going fast because of the lights moving around it like it was flying through space. But in its bounds, it wasn’t actually moving at all. It was an illusion. I […]