In the delicate space between work and play — The longest day of the year has come and gone. Personally, I’m a fan of the winter solstice, because I like to say the sentence, “From here on out, we get a little more light every day until it’s summer.” Now it is summer. We’ve reached the summit, and from…

Thanks to the strange way people can now make money, I have learned something — During the pandemic, as many people did, I decided I wanted to take up a hobby, and by “take up a hobby” I mean “actually plug in and try and use the MIDI keyboard and learn piano.” I’d tried roughly four different times in my life to play, and each…

When surrender means you’ve won — It’s been two years since my last doctor’s appointment. At that visit our discussion was shrouded by social distancing and early motherhood. It was a time when I desperately begged for closeness and the world replied with a stern and final, “No.” My days were held together with a matching…

An old story about addiction, recovery, and an old friend — “He always listened to you,” your mother says to me and I don’t have the heart to tell her that wasn’t so. She doesn’t know about the time we were 25 and you jumped off the moving train and I picked gravel out of your back for hours or the…

The space that we are raised in shapes us, for better or for worse — “We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.” — Tennessee Williams The house groans. The groan starts off low and gradually…

It creates a record of your life that’s for you and you alone. — I’ve been keeping notebooks since I was in elementary school, but I became a full-fledged journaler in my senior year of high school. I was taking a class about modernism and postmodernism with my favorite teacher, Mr. Cho, and we were required to maintain notebooks, which we would turn in…

Remembering my younger self in the pool — I started swimming this February because I wanted to do something different. Sometimes, even I get bored lifting heavy things. When that happens, I dial back strength training and bring in something new. I wanted to engage in an activity that would be hard enough to demand focus, but not…

Human beings go to great lengths to exit mental discomfort — On April 23, 1842, a certain Mr. S., gentleman farmer aged 50, visited the local medical man with complaints of a “great mental anxiety” for a few weeks because of an increased burden of business duties. Although the record is not specific, the breaking point came when Mr. S. witnessed…