I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but when I was a girl, I had a brilliant notion: what if I could have all of the sicknesses of my lifetime at once, rather than having them parceled out here and there, when they were least expected and seldom welcome? Or, because I quickly figured out [...]
personal growth
This piece builds on this one, which you may or may not want to read as well. Once upon a time, when I was very much like I am today, only with a lot more income and a lot less happiness, I found myself shopping in a store that sold nothing but sexy ladies’ underwear. [...]
In theory, we are all our own people, fiercely individual, to hell with convention, letting our freak flags fly. In practice, we cave all the time. Usually, without even knowing it. Almost always to our own detriment.
I’ve been a bit wobbly, finding my land legs again. Or maybe my regular-usual legs are my sea legs. Maybe I’m usually adrift, out voyaging in an inward fashion, and the concrete trips here and there, the actual vagabonding, are my trips ashore, where I land hard, and, finding the land hard, can hardly walk. [...]
There’s a clutter-reducing trick many people advocate for dealing with the really stubborn, clingy stuff. You take a box, fill it with the Questionable Clutter, and mark it with a date. Then, over the next weeks or months, if you find yourself truly in need of one of the items, you go back to the [...]
I came to Meghan Daum’s writing backwards, or sideways, or at least, highly out of order, my fault, entirely. While she was living in Manhattan, getting published in The New Yorker, I was going off the deep end in Los Angeles, and had let my subscription lapse. By the time she’d moved to Los Angeles and [...]
I have a signed Keith Haring poster from the New York Book Fair that’s been with me for 25 years now. It’s moved with me from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Chicago, where I finally had it framed and hung it proudly on the wall of my first bona-fide “grownup” apartment (i.e., all mine, with furniture [...]
I didn’t submit a talk show idea to Oprah. (You can thank me in the comments.) I didn’t submit a panel idea to South by Southwest. I didn’t submit myself as a speaker for the international women’s conference a friend urged me to. I haven’t entered a contest or sweepstakes in I-don’t-know-how long, haven’t asked [...]
For most of my life, I thought I envied people who were on a mission: the ones who were seized by the desire to paint or to build stuff or to cure malaria. It was only very recently, maybe as recently as last week, or the week before (time has been playing tricks on me [...]
While searching for a particular Merlin sound bite on scaring yourself into stuff that I wanted to grab for my most recent newsletter1, I stumbled on this transcription of a different equally wonderful interview that Colin Marshall did with him. There is such incredibly rich goodness in it, great, smart things we all know about [...]
