Category: Uncategorized

“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…

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…

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…

“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…

“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…

“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…

“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 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.…

“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…

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…