My mother Leslie has always been a funny little firecracker, prone to fits and bursts of energy bordering on hysteria. When you walk in the door or get her on the phone, she comes at you fast and furious with the words leaving her mouth quicker than her brain can consciously string them together. Sometimes I need to remind her to slow down, take your time, grab a breath.  It’s nice to be around someone who finds gratitude for life’s simple joys, but things like a really good cup of coffee or finding the right bowl to serve pasta in can flood her brain’s pleasure center and send her buzzin ..read more

The next time you see me, I will not be dressed casually. I won’t be in yoga pants or an old college tee or anything resembling pajamas. Hopefully it will be warm enough for chambray sundresses or midi-length skirts or cute tanks and flowy pants in loose, crinkled linen. I’ll probably be wearing a hat, something with a wide, firm brim because it’ll finally be hot and sunny but also because my roots by then will require their own zip code. My shirt may be red, because I look terrific in red, or I might be wearing yellow because frankly we could all use some yellow, but I can almost guarantee I ..read more

Once a week, I take a ten-minute walk to my office. Sometimes I pick up a few books I think I might need, but mostly I go to water my plant. I’ve kept it alive an entire year, and I’m not prepared to lose her now. On my first visit, over six weeks ago, I entered my square sunny room, shut the door, took a seat on the lumpy brown couch and burst into tears. I hadn’t expected to cry right away, but I guess most people enter therapy offices feeling like that. Like you, my new office is at home, in the spot where we have the strongest WIFI signal, which happens to be the glass-top table that runs ..read more

Between Austin and San Antonio is a cluster of charming towns set between rolling hills and connected by long open roads. These towns are quaint and small, with strange names like Bulverde, Boerne and Uvalde that, given the right accent, roll off the tongue like syrup before clunking on the floor like lead. The Texas Hill Country is considered one of the most beautiful areas in the state, not just for its rugged hills or 8pm sunsets that look like fruit sherbet smeared across the sky, but also for its bare, wide open spaces. Unlike the highways around Houston, long roads here aren’t flanked by ..read more

My first job in New York City was as a beauty editor, not for Elle or Vogue where underpaid editorial assistants dress like fashion models and the office bathroom doubles as a sitting parlour, but for a series of hairstyling magazines purchased almost exclusively at Wal-Mart by women of a certain age looking to refresh their bob with bangs.  I took solace in the fact that the girl in my position several years prior went on to become editor-in-chief of both Jane and Lucky. Maybe my next gig would be more glamorous. Perhaps I’d get lucky too. The early aughts were an exciting time to work periph ..read more

Vinny realized around New Year’s that he has 13 vacation days leftover from 2019. He has to use them by the end of February or they’ll vanish into dust. My first question: Who loses track of vacation time? How does one lose track of vacation time? I consider free time (free time that’s PAID FOR by someone else!) the most valuable time of all, and I’m not sure how I feel about someone who simply forgets all about it. What are you? An overachiever? A responsible, hard-working partner with an unusually strong work ethic? What a day that must have been, when HR warned him to “use it or lose it ..read more

*Five years ago, I challenged myself to write a post using the trendiest catchphrases on Instagram and social media. Those were the days of FOMO and Y tho? and being obsesssssssed and throwing around amazeballs. As we close out this year and decade, I thought it’d be apropos AF to round up all the cliches and downright silly overused lingo I’ve spotified this year on insta, tiktok, snapchat, youtube, facebook, bumble, hinge and for the people who don’t understand the concept of a digital footprint— linkedin. So charge those crystals under a full moon, pour yourself a frosty oatmilk cold brew a ..read more

I’ve never really written too much about my work life here, but for the unacquainted— I’m a therapist. No, not a physical therapist. Not an occupational therapist, and not a speech therapist neither (clearly). I’m a psychotherapist, a talk therapist. If you want to get technical— a licensed clinical social worker. I’ve been counseling for over ten years now, and most of my work has been in community mental health clinics. I’m very lucky in the sense that my work has always been incredibly gratifying to me, even when I was doing it in places where the pay was rotten, the work demands unreason ..read more

Well, shit. I had all these great intentions of starting a new blog and writing a bunch of normalizing and relatable posts about life after 40, and here I am months later having written almost nothing of the sort. Perhaps that in and of itself is a hallmark of this perplexing stage of life— having great intentions, making the best laid plans, then adjusting all that to fit around important obligations that crop up and demand attention. You know, boring stuff like feeding your kids and ensuring you can make your house and car payments. But today, I thought I’d drop in and write about something ..read more

Twenty years of New York City jaywalking could not prepare me for the stress and terror of crossing a street in Cairo where the roads are not paved, or lined or designed in any way to let you know if they are meant to accommodate three lanes of traffic or five. Because there are no lanes, cars glide up next to each other, so close they look like they’re going to merge but somehow, miraculously, don’t. Motorcycles braid themselves through the lanes of cars, sometimes in the opposite direction of traffic. A few days into the trip, I ask our tour guide if people ever use turn signals. She didn’t ..read more