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How My Father’s Cruel Words Shaped My Life for 45 Years

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“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” ~Toni Morrison, Beloved

My father was on the other side of my bedroom door, banging hard on it with the flat of his hand, screaming at me to get back to the table and finish my plate.

I told him there was no way I was going anywhere near my sister after she’d just hit me.

That’s when he said the thing that gutted me.

“Well, you know, I used to give your mother a good swift kick in the ass when she deserved it. You act like that, and you get …

How I Found Hope After a Life-Changing Diagnosis

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In 2014, at the age of thirty-one, I was told that I might soon have serious difficulty walking.

For months, my body had been sending me signals I did not understand. I experienced numbness, vertigo, falls, loss of coordination, difficulty reading, disorientation, bladder problems, and other neurological symptoms.

I would walk down the street and suddenly lose my balance. I would look at a page and struggle to process the words. Parts of my body stopped feeling familiar.

Eventually, an MRI revealed more than thirty lesions in my brain and more than twenty in my spinal cord.

I was diagnosed …

What My Tired Eyes Taught Me About Paying Attention

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In my second year of Ayurvedic medical school, my eyes started burning around nine o’clock every night.

I did what most students do. I rubbed them, blinked hard a few times, and went back to the screen. Exams were close. The lecture slides were on my laptop, the reference texts were PDFs, and the practice questions were on my phone. My whole education had quietly moved onto glass, and I was reading it for twelve or thirteen hours a day.

The irony took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. By day I was memorizing Shalakya Tantra, the branch of …

The Hidden Danger of Burnout No One Warns You About

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For most of my career, I trusted my ability to assess risk.

I spent decades working in technology, much of it in information security and startups. Risk was not an abstract concept to me. It was my job to anticipate what could go wrong, question assumptions, identify vulnerabilities, and make decisions when the consequences mattered.

And yet, at one of the most important moments of my life, I failed to recognize a vulnerability in myself.

I was severely burned out.

I didn’t understand how much it had affected my judgment until after the financial consequences could no longer be undone.

…

When You Can’t Do Things the Way You Used To

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“What stands in the way becomes the way.” ~Marcus Aurelius

I’ve had two strokes, and after each, there were things I had to relearn. Walking wasn’t what it used to be. My balance became a problem. There are days when my head is foggy, and I have trouble concentrating. My body doesn’t always cooperate with what my mind wants to do.

And over the years, I’ve had plenty of other health problems thrown into the mix.

But I’m not telling you that because I want anybody feeling sorry for me. That’s really not my thing. If anything, the health problems

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3 Ways Your Brain Adapts After Emotional Abuse

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“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ~C.S. Lewis

I’m not sure why some of us have a tougher journey than others, but I can say I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t loved a narcissist.

Most days now are filled with love from my three little rescue doggies. But there are days I am teleported back in time.

Just the other day, I was standing in my kitchen on a quiet Tuesday afternoon when a familiar smell caught my attention.

I had the window …

How I Changed My Life in the Middle of Chaos

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“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.” ~Squire Bill Widener

For years, I had a private deal with myself: I would really change when life became manageable.

When work slowed down. When the family was okay. When I had more energy. When there was less stress. When I could finally focus.

The problem was that life never signed that deal.

At my heaviest, I weighed 465 pounds. I had learned how to live inside a body that made almost everything harder while also becoming very good at explaining why now was not the right time to …

From Anxious to Free: The Surprising Power of Acceptance

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“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.” ~Carl Rogers

For over a year, I woke up at 3 a.m. almost every night.

I would lie there in the dark, my heart pounding, my mind sprinting through the same loop: What if I can’t handle my job? What if I lose my income? What if I spend the rest of my life alone?

Eventually I would fall back asleep around dawn, then drag myself through the workday like a ghost—exhausted, flat, and pretending to be fine.

I wasn’t just going through a …

When Helping Becomes Controlling: What I Learned About Fear and Love

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“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” ~Carl Rogers

There is a part of me that really, really loves vitamins.

Like…a lot.

I have always been endlessly fascinated by health, which means I can spend a wildly unreasonable amount of time talking about inflammation, mitochondria, blood sugar, nervous systems, magnesium, and all the other things that make most people’s eyes glaze over while my little heart lights right up.

So the vitamin-loving part is real.

Very me.

And, as I recently discovered while sitting beside my swollen-faced fiancé in urgent …

Why I Always Thought Other People Were Upset with Me

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“Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you.” ~Don Miguel Ruiz

I used to walk into a room and check everyone else’s emotional temperature before I noticed my own.

A tightened jaw meant I should get quieter. A distracted answer meant I’d done something wrong. If my partner sighed while unloading the dishwasher, I’d go back through the last hour looking for the mistake that caused it.

I called this empathy. It felt like attentiveness, and honestly, I was proud of it, because I noticed things other people missed.

What I didn’t see was that I wasn’t …

The Tattoo That Marks 13 Years of Healing After Abuse

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“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” ~Maya Angelou

In June 2011, I got a Facebook friend request from a guy I vaguely knew from college. We’d never dated, never even been close, but I knew him by reputation. Charming. Vain. The kind of guy who always had someone.

He’d just been hired to teach at my school, where I was about to start my fifth year as a counselor. He framed the request as wanting to connect as colleagues, so I accepted.

When school started that August, he made it a point to show …

The Truth About My Marriage I Finally Had to Face

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“You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.” ~Unknown

Tomorrow, a court will grant me a divorce after eleven years of marriage. I’ve spent the last several months rereading a decade of my own life like evidence in a case, trying to understand how I got here. What I found surprised me: not one dramatic betrayal, but hundreds of small moments where I chose to make myself smaller so the relationship could stay intact.

I met my husband when we were teenagers, through a mutual friend, and fell for him the way you fall for …

Why We Keep Accepting the Same Painful Relationship Patterns

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~George Santayana

I was gone about two hours.

I’d gone to see my stepbrother, who lived nearby. My girlfriend didn’t want to come, so I told her to rest, and I’d be back soon.

When I got back to my father’s property, where we lived in the camper we’d bought together, it was gone. So was she.

She’d packed my clothes into a bag and left them on my father’s porch on her way out. That told me everything I needed to know. The camper was the only place …

From Hyper-Independent to Human: Learning How to Accept Help

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“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.” ~Brené Brown

It happened on a regular Tuesday night over the smallest thing. I was cooking dinner after a really long, exhausting day at my job. I spent the whole day fixing problems for everyone else, and I was completely drained.

I reached into the cupboard to grab a heavy glass jar of pasta sauce. It slipped right out of my fingers and smashed all over the hard floor.

Red sauce splashed across the white cabinets, …

When Doing More Is Really an Attempt to Control the Outcome

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“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” ~John Allen Paulos

I refreshed the analytics page even though I had checked it only a few minutes earlier. The number had not changed, so I opened the project, reread the opening line, tested a button, and returned to the dashboard. My shoulders were tight and my eyes felt dry, but I kept moving between the same pages as though one of them might suddenly tell me what to do next.

The work was finished for the evening. Everything important was functioning, …

When “Nothing Is Wrong” Keeps You in the Wrong Life

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“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” ~Carl Jung

I was twenty-eight years old, standing in front of a mirror, reaching for my lipstick.

I couldn’t put it on.

I was engaged. A wedding was ahead of me. The invitations, expectations, and imagined future were already gathering momentum.

Nothing was visibly wrong.

That was the problem.

As I looked at my reflection, I could not find myself inside the life I was preparing to enter.

There had been no betrayal, no dramatic confrontation, and no single moment I could point to and say, “There. That …

The Year I Tried to Optimize My Way into Love

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“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~William Bruce Cameron

I noticed it halfway through the conversation.

We were outside a café on a warm Saturday, close enough to the next table that I could hear someone laughing behind me. The person across from me was telling a story about getting lost on a hike, because they had been certain they could manage without a map, and they were laughing at themselves as they told it. I laughed in the right place.

Then my attention slid. Sense of humor, strong. Conversation, easy. …

Why Rest Should Be a Priority, Not a Reward

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“In an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.” ~Pico Iyer, from his TED talk “The Art of Stillness”

It was a Tuesday in late September, the kind of afternoon that feels borrowed from summer. I had a work deadline at 5:00. I went to the park anyway.

I spread a blanket on the grass, unpacked a little cheese and some fruit, and poured tea from the thermos I’d filled mostly out of habit. I had a book in my bag that I never opened.

For two hours, I sat outside in the middle …

How “Doing Fine” Was Actually Holding Me Back

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“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” ~Carl Rogers

For most of my life, the story looked like a straight line going up. I never hit bottom. This isn’t that kind of story.

And for a long time, that was exactly the problem.

From the outside, my life looked good. I had built things I was proud of and a family I love. If you knew me, you would have said I was doing well, and you would probably have been right.

So this isn’t a story about hitting bottom. …

Emotionally Overwhelmed? 5 Simple Practices That Can Help

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“Whatever you’re feeling, it will eventually pass. You won’t feel sad forever. At some point, you will feel happy again. You won’t feel anxious forever. In time, you will feel calm again. You don’t have to fight your feelings or feel guilty for having them. You just have to accept them and be good to yourself while you ride this out. Resisting your emotions and shaming yourself will only cause you more pain, and you don’t deserve that. You deserve your own love, acceptance, and compassion.”  ~Lori Deschene

One cry a day. I have used this four-word phrase to defend …