Romantic relationships tell you a lot about yourself. Your attachment style. Your love language. Your needs and desires. Your habits and coping styles. In other words, a romantic relationship puts you on a pedestal. And if you pay close enough attention, you’ll come to learn that not everything is black and white as it may initially seem. The difficult part is that we often go into relationships with unrealistic expectations about how we want things to be like. Interestingly enough, when you take in all the factors that have a role in romantic relationships and the expectations you carry for…

Learning To Love All Of Me.

I panicked but instead of pushing away, I unconsciously detached “physical me” from “emotional me” and “spiritual me”.

Internally I was screaming RUN, but externally my body would not listen.

It had other plans.

Other needs, perhaps?

Regardless, the connection had been severed.

I felt shame, weak, and vulnerable.

And then the anger came.

The Light.

It didn’t appear as a flash of lightning, but more of a gradual glow, that one day yielded an “a-ha!”

My lack of trust and fear of opening up had left me stifled when it came to intimate relationships. What I wanted was not what I…

My great-grandmother turned toward me, but her focus was somewhere distant. We sat on the stone wall of her raised garden, staring at the 40-foot pine trees towering over her house; they were knee-high when she planted them over half a century ago. The cold, dry weather wrought strong south-west winds, blowing pine needles across her yard, triggering a bout of anamnesis. Smiling, she said, “one hundred is when I’ll go.” Looking down at her arthritis scathed hand, she murmurs, “that’s… enough for me.” She said something similar when she was nearing 95, although the time of her tone sounds…

This story from my father taught me that sometimes, mistakes can be powerful statements in disguise.

My father strongly disagrees with my opinion that this story is a revolutionary story, but he still gave me permission to write about it. I thought it would be appropriate to write about it during Black History Month, though my dad doesn’t think the story is appropriate at all.

My father is a Black man and a saxophone player. He met my white mother while playing in a band that was based in Southern Indiana. …

Saturday, February 13th will be my sixtieth birthday. This will be the first decade of my life I enter, free of mental illness. I feel as though I should be walking through some kind of massive gate, an entrance to an emotionally healthy decade.

Initially diagnosed over the course of several years in the late 1980s with anorexia, major depressive disorder, and after my second suicide attempt, with a borderline personality disorder, the psychiatrists told my parents not to hope for much. In 1991, I was thirty years old.

There is one thought I cannot push away. My mother never…

I feel as though I’m being asked to choose between something as basic as breathing and my hard-won emotional health. And these days, as the pandemic comes up on a year, I’m renewing my fight for my emotional health on a daily basis.

I was diagnosed with adult-onset asthma in 2015, when I was fifty-four. Developing asthma as an adult is more serious than developing it as a child. The death rate for adult-onset asthma is significantly higher than that for childhood asthma.

My asthma comes with a bit of a quirk — I can’t hear myself wheeze. I’ve gone…

The six degrees

It’s a great movie, a wonderful party game, and a fascinating concept — the idea that we are all connected in some way by just six levels, six steppingstones of people in our associations and familial relations. If you doubt the veracity of such a claim, go drive Uber for a living.

One of the more interesting aspects I find in writing about my job as a driver is that I am quite possibly writing about someone you know, someone who resembles someone you know, or someone who knows someone you know…or quite possibly even you.

It runs deeper than…

It was 11:30 a.m. My three-year-old daughter was losing her mind. In the background, a group of nuns stared at us. I’m quite sure that at least one of them was feeling smug about her decision to remain chaste.

We were at The Grotto, a Catholic church nestled in the serenity of a sprawling garden, lush with grass, trees, and flowering bushes. Our reasons for being there had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the fact that mom needed to get out of the house. …