Author: jamesengpengong@outlook.com

The news: everything is bad. Poets: okay, but what if everything is bad and we still fall in love with the moon and learn something from the flowers. ~Nikita Gill My dad died when I was thirty-one. I wasn’t a child but barely felt like an adult. He had reached retirement, but only just. Mary…

“You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.” ~Dan Millman For as long as I can remember, my mind has been a never-ending maze of what-ifs. What if I make the wrong decision? What if I embarrass myself? What if I fail? My brain worked overtime, analyzing…

“Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.” ~Akshay Dubey The realization came to me during a chaotic day at the Philadelphia public school where I worked as a counselor. A young student sat across from me, her body language mirroring anxiety patterns I knew all too…

“If you don’t like something, change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” ~Mary Engelbreit “So, what do you think?” my husband asked, the dinner table lit by the soft glow of the overhead light. He’d been talking for a while, and I knew I should have been listening.…