Imagination may be a strange lead-in for a piece about a young girl who suffered from extreme separation anxiety disorder (SAD) with growing social anxiety and strong obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) tendencies.

Yet, imagining she could be someone she was not while overhearing adults whisper to one another that it was true, she could never be that someone; she found the strength to live from her dreams and turn off the external voices.

Despite years of humiliation and embarrassment and having to scrap the ground to find her self-esteem, she prayed for and imagined grabbing hold of a miracle.

When she was six years old, the doctor said all kids suffered some degree of separation anxiety but eventually grew out of it. We did all the things the pediatrician and a therapist advised: No scary television. Follow through on our promises. And, since she was overly attached to me, it was essential to have a ritual for when I left on business travel and for when I returned. We never made fun of her for not sleeping at grandma’s or made her feel embarrassed when I drove to a sleepover at midnight to pick her up and bring her home. …

When I was ten, I got this crazy idea that diamonds were hidden inside hard coal. I told my two cousins about it, and we figured that anthracite coal held the most promise because it was so hard. And, we were in luck because we lived in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, and its hard coal was all around us, including the basement.

We scrambled down to the coal cellar, grabbed a lump of it, and started whaling away with hammers. …

The popularity of real crime television and fictional series such as Criminal Minds, and the UK-produced, The Fall and the third season of The Unforgotten (both on Netflix), gives us the image of the psychopath. He’s a serial killer that also inflicts sexual horror on his victims. He’s Hannibal Lector, the BTK killer, and Ted Bundy.

But the truth is that the majority of psychopaths have not committed a crime. Researchers think that most psychopaths figure out how to fulfill their needs through relationships, occupations, and by creating a world that fulfills sexual desires.

The non-violent psychopath, however, is still an expert at assessing potential targets, controlling victims, and walking away when those they’re using are no longer useful. …

The slight sway started with my head as I looked over the waist-high guard rails. I leaned forward to look directly straight down to the spot I would hit, a drop of thirty-five or fifty feet when a teetering-like motion as if I was standing on one leg for too long caused me to reach out to the handrail.

The big slide, which is what I’ve come to call that period, began in 2012 and snowballed into an avalanche by 2017. And it’s what led me to the overpass. Too much loss mixed with very poor decision-making: a divorce after a thirty-year marriage, an estranged relationship with my daughters, an ill-advised three-year relationship with a single mother, a startup and financial meltdown, and the death of my aunt who was more a mother to me than my own — did I forget anything? …

It won’t if you remain passionate about seeking new experiences.

The perception that time speeds up as we grow older is one of the greater mysteries of life. One study showed that those over age 40 viewed recent times elapsing faster than their childhood.

And another study that included university professors and non-retirees aged 60–80 underestimated the passage of time. They thought two minutes and twenty seconds had passed when it was three minutes. Where did the time go? (The younger aged 19–24 group estimated three minutes and three seconds.)

We all have time periods that seem to slip by in a blink and, damn, we can hardly remember anything about it. …

On the inside, I wasn’t the type who would celebrate being a free man after divorce. I just acted like one. And, I wasn’t one of those types who would race out looking for sex. But I acted like one. I cherished my strong relationship with my two adult daughters and voiced out loud to others that it would undoubtedly weather the storm. Except I jeopardized it with my behavior.

I’m not a stupid man. I entered therapy several years before I divorced. My ex-wife suffered from chronic illnesses, and over the final ten years, our partnership turned into one of co-dependency. I became the enabler that fostered her dependency, which became an authoritative source of self-esteem and self-worth for me. We were each other’s cocaine. I didn’t know how to change the dynamics. …

Is there life after death? What happens to our human spirit? After we cross over, can we reach out and message our loved ones?

Some of us receive unexpected messages through dreams, a flash of brightness when there shouldn’t be, and other signs that give us pause. Are these random and coincidental? Or, are they so out of the ordinary that you know they are signs and a feeling you can’t explain tingles from your scalp down to your toes.

Two widows of 9/11 sat in a pew in the middle of a church filled with 2,000 mourners attending a memorial service for a friend who also died in the World Trade Center that day. White dust particles began settling on their shoulders and clothes. They looked up to the ceiling and saw nothing. The people around them watched the white dust appear out of nowhere. …

I arrived twenty minutes early for my bankruptcy hearing and decided to sit outside on a bench. The morning was chilly with low humidity, which was unusual for early August in Raleigh.

The bench had a large seat with a slightly reclined back, and it allowed me to stretch out my legs, fold my arms, close my eyes, and focus on the feel of fresh air versus the heat of standing in front of the court magistrate.

“Bankruptcy court?” said a deep tenor voice on my left.

I opened my eyes and turned to look into a rough unshaven stubble, big droopy brown eyes and large round face sitting on top of broad shoulders. The man wasn’t fat, just big. Like he once played left tackle. I glanced down at the backpack between his legs and a Nike gym bag next to his foot. …