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I recently came across an exercise where you write a letter to your younger self. I chose to write to myself at age 15 when I was full of teenage angst and bursting with ambition and struggling to contain other emotions that felt like they could tear me apart. As soon as I started the...
When I was very young, my brother and I were watching the Jerry Lewis telethon on Labor Day weekend. The local news station had a big fish tank set up outside a hotel and was asking people to come drop off change to help the telethon. My brother and I begged my mom to drive...
I was chatting with an artist friend the other day whose career is taking off. I complimented her by saying she’d done everything right over the years in terms of following all the steps to achieving her desired career and being patient with the process. She said something to the effect that it wasn’t hard...
Once when my daughter was in college, we were driving down the freeway to some event. She was justifiably upset about something that had happened to her. We allowed her to rant, we validated her right to be angry, we agreed that an injustice had occurred, we offered solutions, but she was locked in a...
I’ve been failing at my sabbatical. That’s the word I’ve been choosing to describe this period of stepping back from the work for which I once felt such devotion. It sounded like a more romantic word than “break” and a less confusing term than “gap year” and a less dramatic designation than “mid-life crisis.” It...
The other night at a local concert, singer-songwriter Maia Sharp talked about a conversation that took place when her long-term relationship was coming to an end. Her partner said, “You’re gonna make a nice girl miserable someday.” Maia must have gotten a certain look on her face, because her girlfriend then added, “Oh my God....
This post originally ran on Oct. 31, 2015, but it’s worth a revisit: Today is Halloween, which means you are no doubt getting ready for a party or filling your bowl with candy for the trick-or-treaters or, if you are the parent of a teenager, like me, cleaning your house before his/her friends arrive to...
Since rewatching the broadcast of Come From Away—the Broadway musical now streaming on Apple TV— I’ve had the song “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” stuck in my head. We sang it often at mass when I was growing up, and I found it to be not only a beautiful melody, but wonderfully aspirational...
The other day I was listening to a podcast (I neglected to note which one) and one of the guests said something I’ve always believed but never had the guts to declare out loud. He said whenever he meets someone who insists they have no regrets, he assumes they’re either lying, or kidding themselves, or...
I was chatting with a woman at a fundraiser about her career at our local university. She described several roles she’d played. “Wow,” I said. “You must have been there quite a while.” “Thirty-one years,” she said. By the tone in her voice, it was clear she felt that amount of time was significant, meaningful,...