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In 2014, my husband was admitted to the hospital on New Year’s Eve. He’d recently been diagnosed with an untreatable, incurable type of cancer, but we thought we would have more than a couple months left. Initially, they just wanted to keep him for observation for a day or two, but he died on January…

For most of my life, I would’ve proudly called myself a perfectionist. Doing things well and with precision is important to me. But over the years I’ve realized that the ‘perfectionist’ label is one of the most unhealthy stories I’ve told myself. You know what really bugs me? When people *brag* about being perfectionists. If…

It was my junior or senior year of college and I remember the teary, frustrated call to my mom, “why are people so difficult? Why can’t they be predictable like equations?” Fun fact: if you didn’t know, I was a physics major in college. I laugh now, but I also have some of the same…

Sometimes when we share the innermost parts of ourselves we leave the encounter feeling like we’ve been stripped bare, sometimes even flayed on the altar of vulnerability. It can even feel like a hangover – like you can’t face the world and your whole self is now too tender to even try.  Brené Brown –…

When I was first diagnosed with anxiety and depression I was in my mid-20s and I didn’t know anyone else who experienced mental health issues. I felt misunderstood and incredibly alone. A year or so later a friend had a few panic attacks and – while I hated that she was going through this –…

When it comes to friendship, there’s some kind of unspoken fear that we have to have it all together or our friends won’t want to be our friends anymore. Do you find yourself worrying that if your friends could see your *insert weakness, fault, or fear here* they’d go running? What if friendship was less…

I had an interesting conversation about friendship years ago. We had just moved to a new duty station and I was concerned that my husband wasn’t putting in any effort to find new friends. He looked at me, confused, “I already have friends.”  “But you don’t have friends, here.” He was someone who only needed…

My family moved to a new town a couple nights before starting high school. I knew no one and spent the majority of my 9th grade year eating lunch alone. I’ve never been someone that’s been able to make myself fit in so it was really challenging to find the people I vibed with. No…

I was a very litigious adolescent. I mean, I wasn’t literally bringing court cases as a 12 year old, but I saw injustice everywhere. This happened to be in the late 90s and early 00s when “hypocrisy” was a regular topic of conversation and “hypocrite” a label to be avoided. The buzzword was used to…