Happiness Lives in the Ordinary Things
5 Harmful Habits That Make a Stressful Day Even Worse
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
“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
“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
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
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 …
