Category Resilience

The Levis

I just want to go on record that, despite what the kids at school called me, we were not “white trash”. We were “poor-but-proud”. As near as I can tell, the main difference between the two categories had to do…

Deserved Maintenance

Some years ago, I was talking to the person who was my spiritual director at the time. I was in the midst of unrecognized (by me, anyway) burnout, and she was encouraging me to take some time away. We had…

Giving it 80%

In 2012, I spent a week at Mepkin Abbey, in South Carolina. Mepkin Abby is a Trappist monastery, and they invite folks to come and stay with them as a form of retreat. A friend I really respected did it…

Advice You Will Ignore

Since posting my story of burnout, I have had no less than 5 conversations with people in similar places. All people in the so-called helping professions, all doing good work, all exhausted. I used to teach classes on self-care, but…

Breaking Slowly

I recently began doing morning pages again. If that means nothing to you, the least you need to know for the following story to make sense is that I am doing three pages of handwritten freewriting each morning. You can…

The Ugly Part

In our last house, we had a tiny bathroom. Like, 5 feet by 5 feet. The sink was in a tiny 2-foot-wide nook in the corner. All of me wouldn’t fit in the mirror. The tiled tub surround was made…

So You Had A Relapse

Hey there. Yes, you. Can we talk? I saw you with your New Year’s resolutions. You were going to quit drinking. Or start saving 10% of your paycheck. Or start meditating 30 10 minutes every day. Read to your kids…

Vernacular shelving

Who invented the table? Who was the first person to make a chair that looked like a chair? Think about the first person who made a box. Did they have any inkling of how virtually all furniture in the future…