Anxiety . . . is an illness of “what-ifs.” The mind takes the most minuscule threat and blows it up to–not even huge proportions, just unrealistically large ones.
Positive
A Skeptic’s Ghost Story
I’d like to say I don’t believe in ghosts, the spirits that haunt the human world after the body has ceased to contain them. Ghosts have stories; they haunt a place, […]
Three Things I Learned in PR
Working in public relations I quickly learned three things that have informed more than just my work, they’ve changed my thinking.
A Drop in the Ocean
Of course, there is no way I am going to fix a fractured world. There is no way I am going to fix even a fraction of it. But as Mother Teresa says, “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.” Accepting that my contribution will be only a drop, the question becomes “where in the ocean will my drop fall?”
Discipline: The Thrill of Routine
Some people are self-motivators. They get up, look at their to-do lists, and actually do the things on them. These people can be very annoying. I know because I live with one. […]
Texas, Oh Texas
–After “The Beautiful” by Michelle Tea Belly up, back down on scratch grass growing in cracked black soil, my childhood fingers slipped inside the cracked handles of the earth. High winds pushed […]
Mourning the Loss of a Woman I Should Never Have Met
Madiha was my step-mother-in-law—my husband’s father’s wife. My husband’s mother passed when he was 16, his sisters, much younger, needed care. Needed a mother. Madiha became my father-in-law’s second wife. Madiha passed […]
The Vacation Thief
For the first time since vacation planning in March, I was grateful rather than resentful we weren’t vacationing in Europe.
A Friend Indeed: The Importance of Being Valued
There are some people for whom the term friend means pretty much what it does on Facebook: someone with whom they have interacted in some (presumably) pleasant way. I am not one […]
How to Graduate from a Pandemic State of Mind
I am buying graduation decorations and stringing them up. A big “Congratulations” banner will hang across the window on the back porch. The new outdoor lights dipping down from the upstairs balcony […]
The Gloria Sirens 