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The Generational Cycle I’m Breaking Without Losing My Fire

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“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” ~Carl Jung

“You’re just like your mother.” I came across those words in a post recently, followed by a response that made me pause: “Actually, I’m my mother’s revenge. I’m the voice she didn’t have and the boundary she couldn’t set.”

It stayed with me, not because I felt any desire for revenge against anyone, but because something was resonating. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, so I went back to something I had written five years ago.

In 2021, Tiny

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When Drinking Stopped Being Fun and Why I Quit

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I stopped drinking ten months ago. It’s the longest I’ve ever gone. I’ve been thinking a lot about what finally made me stop because the truth is, I loved drinking. I really did.

Drinking was such a big part of my life. It was part of growing up, part of my Irish culture, part of friendships, celebrations, dinners, weddings, birthdays. It was just what we did. I started drinking when I was probably thirteen or fourteen, so I don’t really know much of my life without it.

And for a long time, I genuinely enjoyed it.

But eventually the pain …

The Excuses We Make to Avoid Being Vulnerable

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“Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability.” ~Brené Brown

It’s ten at night, and I’m sprawled on the couch at the end of a long day, messaging an old friend from grad school. My wife is already in the slow process of heading to bed, the kids are asleep, and the house is quiet enough for a conversation to feel easy.

This isn’t something that happens often, but it isn’t unusual either.

The beginning is fun, like it always is. What’s going on with my family, how work is treating me, how life is in general. Then the same from her …

How My Life Got Better When I Stopped Trying to Be Normal

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For most of my life, I had a second full-time job. Nobody hired me for it. Nobody paid me. But it ate more hours than anything else I did. The job was pretending to be normal.

I am autistic. Growing up, I didn’t always have that word for it, but I knew one thing for sure: I was different, and different was not safe.

Kids let me know early. I got teased and picked on, and more than once someone looked at me like I was a science experiment and asked if I was from another planet.

So I did …

When You Think You Know Yourself, but You’re Wrong

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I know myself pretty well by now.

I’ve had seven decades to work on the case, and I’m not exactly known for leaving a question alone.

I know what matters to me. What gives me energy. What drains it. What I want more of. And what I have absolutely no intention of putting up with again.

At seventy, I’ve accumulated a fair amount of information.

Preferences. Patterns. Opinions. A fairly detailed operating manual.

After more than two decades as an executive coach, I’m also pretty good at helping other people figure these things out.

I could probably create a beautifully …

What One Great Loss Is Teaching Me About How to Live

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“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” ~Mary Oliver 

I’ve spent much of my life living in fear of countless imagined tragedies—especially the untimely death of those I love.

Growing up, within the span of a few years, three children I was very close to lost one of their parents. The emotional devastation that followed taught me that people can disappear in an instant, shattering a world that had once felt happy and safe. My newfound awareness of the fragility …

The Day I Heard My Own Voice Coming Out of My Child’s Mouth

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“Children are not things to be molded, but people to be unfolded.” ~Jess Lair

Growing up, I was often drawn to classmates who were soft-spoken and gentle. I admired how calm they seemed, because inside me was the opposite. I had a temper that flared at the smallest things.

I always gravitated toward people and situations that gave me a sense of peace, the very thing I didn’t have at home. As a child, I couldn’t understand why I craved that peace so badly. It took me becoming a parent to finally understand why.

My childhood home wasn’t peaceful. There

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When Life Reminds You That Nothing Is Guaranteed

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“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~Albert Camus

A little over a year ago, I went to a bookstore on a cold night to meet a friend at the café. It’s taken me this long to finally write about it.

We had one of those conversations you need when you’re trying to make sense of things during the busy rush of life. The kind of conversation that makes you feel like you’re in the right place at the right time and you’re making progress.

I left the bookstore feeling like …

How to Stop Letting Anxiety Control Your Reactions

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“Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.” ~ Bessel van der Kolk

For years, I thought my anxiety was a character flaw. I thought I could think my way through it. Reason with myself long enough, and I’d finally get to the other side of it. I never did.

Every time I thought I had made peace with it, something small would happen, and I’d be right back in that place. Heart racing. Hands shaking. Anticipating a fallout in something that hadn’t even happened yet.

In my previous marriage, I learned to read a …

When You Can’t Get Everything Right at Once

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“I once heard someone say that a sign of enlightenment was the ability to say (and mean it) ‘Well, this isn’t what I want, but it’s what I got, so okay.’” ~Sylvia Boorstein

I once met a speed-cuber, one of those people who could solve a Rubik’s Cube in sixty seconds. Nice friendly young guy.

I hated him.

Not personally.

I hated him on the level of metaphor.

I hated him because I was jealous. Life always felt to me just like one big insoluble Rubik’s Cube. I could never get things under control on all sides at once. The …

How Being Authentic Taught Me to Love Myself

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“Sometimes the hardest challenge isn’t receiving acceptance from God or other people; it’s receiving acceptance from ourselves.” ~Leigh Finke, Queerfully and Wonderfully Made

Growing up as a pastor’s kid, I had to hide who I was. I was taught that love from parents was conditional. I was taught that mistakes were met with a strict hand and harsh words. I was taught that I had to prove over and over that I was deserving of love.

As I grew up and learned more about the world around me and myself, I had to come to terms with my own sexuality …

How I Rebuilt My Life After Devastating Loss

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On August 22, 2018, my husband collapsed in our bedroom.

Rudy was my best friend and my partner in every sense of the word. His last word was “911.”

I performed CPR while my youngest daughter and my father-in-law stood nearby, and my oldest daughter shielded our four-year-old in another room. The EMTs worked on him before taking him to the hospital, and my father-in-law and I followed the ambulance.

After what felt like forever, a nurse moved us into a small waiting room at the back of the ER. There was no urgency in the building. It was eerily …

When You’re Doing Everything Right but Still Feel Lonely

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“We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.” ~Albert Schweitzer

I pick up my phone even though it has not made a sound.

No missed calls. No new messages. No invitation asking what I am doing or whether I would like to come over. I put it down, but before long I check again.

Still no one.

The only other heartbeat in the house belongs to Oliver, my five-pound chihuahua. He brings me more joy than something so small should be able to carry. I talk to him constantly, and he listens with great interest …

5 Harmful Habits That Make a Stressful Day Even Worse

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When I was little, I often felt as though I lived in two completely different worlds.

My parents’ home was like an ice castle. Everything looked beautiful. Everything was orderly. Everything appeared exactly as it was supposed to. But it was cold.

My mother rarely let me do what I genuinely wanted to do. Instead, I was expected to only do what had to be done.

Many evenings I went to bed exhausted, frustrated, or quietly holding back tears.

Whenever I complained, my mother would simply say, “You have to endure it. That’s how everyone lives.”

Then there was my …

I Used to Think Being Easy to Get Along with Was a Compliment

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“Being easy to please is often mistaken for having no needs at all.” ~Unknown

We’d been together four years when my husband turned to me in the car and asked, completely out of nowhere, “What’s your favorite color?”

I laughed, assuming he was joking. He wasn’t.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I realized I don’t actually know. I know mine’s blue. I don’t know yours.”

I opened my mouth to answer, and nothing came out. Not because I didn’t have a favorite color. Because I genuinely couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked me a question like that, and my …

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.

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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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