Yearly Archives: 2019

What I wanted to say was, It took him years to die overnight. He was an alcoholic. Drank himself to death at 47.

“Tim’s bothering me,” Luke’s message said. “If he doesn’t stop, I’m going to blow his fucking head off.” I called Luke back. “I know about Tim bothering you. He bothers me too. But I thought I should point out that Tim is dead.”

The anxiety of not knowing the extent of her injuries numbed my limbs and tightened my chest, and I could not concentrate on the tasks I needed to accomplish. Neither could I overcome the fear of actually finding out what had happened.

There is nothing wrong with self-improvement. Not one damn thing. But are all these books, podcasts, and blogs really aimed at self-improvement, or do they sell the idea that the way someone is doing something is the way we should all do it?

How did my body tell me about its own grief after my fiance was killed? The breeze on my cheek - just a few weeks after he died - stopped me in my tracks.

I'm convinced that climate change is going to boil us all alive, and this record-setting July heat wave had done nothing to assuage my fear.

My teeth were yellow after a friend committed suicide and I started smoking a pack a day for almost two months. I quit shortly afterward.

...a pleasure so good and liberating I often had to remind myself that it wasn’t wrong. It was just pleasure. Personal. Satisfying. Essential.

I return to the couch and pull up the blanket. I see a pattern outside, as if snow is choreographed as it falls from the sky. Each snowflake is part of a dance, like a ballerina who dances for the sake of dancing.

My daughter is at the forefront of my thinking in EVERY single thing that I do, whether she is in my physical presence or not.

When a student or new friend asks me about my other sons’ whereabouts, I say they are in college which is only half true.

Hope is complicated. After all of these tries, this list of 46 different treatments and therapies, I no longer have hope that things will get better. I have hope that things will not get worse, which is not the same thing. I have a hope that feels a lot more like mercy than it does like faith.