Well-Meaning Doesn’t Equal Welcome

Thank you for caring but… Do you have well-meaning people in your life? Friends, family, coworkers, people who say things to you that they intend to be helpful but, frankly, aren’t? I do. While I know they are telling me what they do out of a genuine, good intent, they’re often missing the point and having the opposite effect. My life is mine to live. To many people, that’s the ultimate selfish statement. Yet it’s the unabashed truth. That’s because

Right and Wrong Are Perceptional Constructs

They don’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. One of society’s most fascinating and terrifying truths is that it has an incessant need for over-simplification. Everything is increasingly shunted to one extreme or the other. The truth, however, is that nearly everything genuinely exists in grey and colored areas between any and all given extremes. Most people live their lives between black and white, fat and thin, wise and foolish, and every other extreme you can name. Even positivity and

Must It Be All or Nothing?

That depends on the situation. Have you ever noticed that when someone decides to lose weight, start a new hobby, or make a large change in their life, they go all in? They throw their full literal or metaphoric weight into the action in an all-or-nothing shot at achieving some goal. Why? Society and its many expectations are the likely culprits. Every commercial diet program, from Jenny Craig to Weight Watchers to Atkins tends to be all or nothing. Buy

One Size Never Fits All

Who are you doing that for? Whose life is it anyway? The balance between living to work and working to live is precarious. Has it always been this way? No. But “they” want you to believe that it’s always been this way AND you can’t change it. For example, after COVID lockdowns, work from home became a lot more popular. All the stories that those who work from home are way less productive were utterly disproven. Yet, here we are,

An Open Letter to the Squirrels in My Brain

You can eff the eff off already. Dear Squirrels in my brain, First, yes, I know you might actually be brain weasels. Whatever. A rodent is a rodent (vermin are vermin). In either case, you sit there in my head, chittering and chattering away, spewing bullshit at me. And I do not appreciate it. There are four distinct areas of my life right now that I’m working to improve. My health, my fencing, my writing career, and my self-esteem. This

You Never Know How the Day Will Go

You choose if that’s a source of comfort, joy, fear, or trepidation. Everybody has bad days. That’s how the world works. Shit happens. Random happenstance comes to pass. The best-laid plans might go brilliantly or horrifically. And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. There are so many factors that can and will impact you every day. Weather, traffic, the whims of other people, the passage of time, and way more things than I care to list

You Will F*ck it Up

Then you’ll f*ck it up again. But you choose to learn from it or not. In my 20s and 30s, I had no idea who I wanted to be. Because of that, I had a tough time staying in any given job or relationship. There are a few interesting patterns you can see when you look at my life. For example, I’ve never lived in the same home for more than 10 years. Same general neighborhood, sure. But never the

You Can Turn That Off and/or Put It Down

The power of disconnecting the tech that equally divides and connects us. Do you ever feel overwhelmed? Ever feel like there are too many connections, too many demands on your attention, and an endless sense of go-do-go? Do you ever feel like you can’t get away and you seldom find peace? I do. It’s not an all-the-time, highly regular occurrence. But there are plenty of times when I’ve felt if I didn’t stay connected or made time to check on

You Can’t Do Anything For Them

A harsh reality and an open door at the same time. Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was such a thing as political discourse in the United States. While there have long been two dominant parties, they still offered up individuals who ranged within their sides. Over the past few decades, they’ve become way more partisan and contentious. What’s more, people who should have zero place in the mix are elected officials (despite utter cluelessness regarding process,

What Does it Really Mean to Let Go?

Recognize and acknowledge how you might be holding yourself back. It’s far too easy to hold onto negative intangibles. Hurts, fears, hatred, anger, distress, sadness, and on and on. Part of life is that shit happens, and you have no control over vast swaths of this. There are lots of books, speakers, and articles about why you should let go. Letting go releases you from that pain and suffering. It’s a seemingly simple concept that is surprisingly difficult to work

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