The audacity of a woman who wants to be loved, wants to be angry, wants attention, wants to be left alone, wants space, wants a voice, wants support, wants freedom, wants help, wants autonomy, wants a community, wants to grieve, wants to be joyful, wants to please you, wants to please herself, wants a room of her own, wants a full table, wants to be understood, wants to be known, wants more. To be a someone who wants what she doesn’t have or wants more of what she does have is to be bold, brave, courageous and risky and if those are adjectives that have ever been used to describe you, Congrat ..read more

Are you finding it hard to concentrate on your creative work right now? I don’t know about you, but every night I lay down at 9pm with a light read because I’m practicing good sleep hygiene, by 9:05 my brain decides to take a nihilism spin and I’ve convinced myself that no one gives a f*ck about what I’m doing because the planet is about to catch fire. But then I fall asleep and wake up optimistic again. And I guess I should expand “right now” to include the last 7 years because this sums up my experience since, oh, 2016. If you have the audacity to pursue your art in a time of crisis after c ..read more

I intentionally saved Monday’s newsletter for today, 7.13. It’s a special day for me and I always acknowledge it with some words of reflection, so thank you for accepting this special edition. Today marks 9 years of sobriety. Alcohol was my drug of choice and it is seriously nothing short of a miracle that this lush has done 9 years of life without a sip. Time can be stingy with her insight. I was so full of questions in the beginning. I wanted to know, Why did I do that? Why was I made this way? Why did it take me so long to quit? Why, why, why? But Time, in her ever omniscient wisdom, has o ..read more

I’m unsure when exactly I accepted this story as truth. Maybe it was sitting in church pews for the entirety of my youth and observing this: Some folks were born with the singing voices of angels, but the rest of us? We were somewhere on the spectrum of mediocre to the poor things that couldn’t carry a tune to save their lives. I was definitely in Camp Mediocre and while that didn’t keep me from singing, it never occurred to me that if I’d sought out some training like vocal lessons, I could get better. I honestly thought that one was born talented and the rest of us were doomed to oridinary ..read more

If you’ve overcome something hard, if you’ve transformed self-harm to self-care, if you meditate every morning, say your prayers every evening, confess to therapists and friends on the reg and you still haven’t manifested your deepest desires, you aren’t doing it wrong. If you are doing everything listed above while also remembering that life is more or less ‘chop wood, carry water’ and YET you still harbor a secret expectation that is juicier than that tedious visual suggests, you aren’t doing it wrong. If you’ve done the ‘work’ and life is still pretty average, you aren’t doing life wrong ..read more

It’s hard not to expect that life should be a series of fair and compensatory transactions. There’s an entire wall in every bookstore, enough podcasts to cover a coast-to-coast roadtrip and 1000s of social media campaigns to testify: Put in the “work”, your life can’t help but become glittery amazing. It’s all but guaranteed. The opposite is true, right? People that live destructively suffer the consequences: They lose their important relationships, they go bankrupt, they go to jail and sometimes, they die. I lived destructively for decades and managed to skirt what’s considered the sludge of ..read more

“I’ve been thinking a lot about mobility” is a helluva accurate way to say you’re over 50 without saying you’re over 50. I was around a lot of family members with mobility issues this week. Some of these folks were experiencing good old fashioned degeneration that comes with age, albeit a tad early. Others’ issues were due to more lifestyle choices along the lines of ‘use it or lose it’. I don’t know how inspiration works for you, but I’m more often motivated by what I DON’T want than what I want. I’m also not much for regret. Because I have personal experience, I believe humans are capable o ..read more

As my personal new year approaches, I’m reminded how grateful I am to have a June birthday. Seasonally, I’m peak-idea manifestor. In January, the traditional NY, my ideas are soft, sleepy and slow, like winter mornings and me. In Spring, they have a shape, feel more seeded. But come Summer, they are fruiting. So birthdays, especially since I hit my mid-40s, are a ticket to change. I had this idea to transition my photography career, put all of eggs in one basket and focus on one genre, solve one problem. And it’s a problem I share with my avatar: I want my creative work to be meaningful to me ..read more

The sound of the shower turning on. A nose blown. The smell of Old Spice and Listerine. Daylight not yet. These things ping my senses, some real, some imagined in my fevered delusion. I wake up for a blip. Yep, still sick. I get to opt out again today. And that’s my husband getting dressed for work, not my father. So weird how my dad’s smells come rushing right back into my nose though, even when I can’t smell a thing. When I’m sick, my membranes are thin. I feel porous, more open to receive. With the day-to-day chores unattainable, I can lie in bed and re-jenga my life and priorities. I don ..read more

Fridays are terrible days to send out a newsletter, statistically speaking. But I woke up this morning with the oh so familiar February longing in my chest that I had to finally capture it, so here is a stab. I wish I could cast a central blame, how uncomplicated would that be? I wish I could just write it off as seasonal and yes, Spring has given us a kiss behind the bleachers but can’t quite commit, that’s part of it. And that my brother has a birthday in February and for a few months on paper, we’re only a year apart but his mental illness has created a chasm between us that I’m not enough ..read more