Growing with gratitude for life's challenges
My therapist recommends that I keep a scrapbook to preserve any accolades and I just laugh. My hubby bought me a leather bound book once for that very reason. I have no idea where it is and am pretty sure it is mostly empty. Not that I haven’t received any positive feedback – just that […]
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Lives are built around the stories we are told. If we have any sense of creativity, at all, we will rewrite those stories to broaden the scope of possibility. I told a former suitor once that I was not destined to be loved. It was the story I had been told growing up. Smarter than […]
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I seem to be stuck in an unhealthy cycle – I push myself beyond my limit and then crash. I’m driven by expectations I’ve set for myself and then taunted by guilt when I can’t fulfill them. There is no room in this toxicity to stop and appreciate accomplishments. Guilt is a crowpecking at my […]
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I was a ‘bad’ student. I caused trouble for teachers, skipped many classes, and still passed high school with honours. I was an enigma, our Vice Principal said. He didn’t know what to do with me, and ended up inviting me to leave. He was always respectful. That young woman joined me, many years later, […]
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I wasn’t taught about boundaries as a child, in fact, I was encouraged not to have any. No one said so, specifically, but in the drive to please, I came to this interpretation. Walls, however, grew organically. I remember many a time, curled up on my childhood bed, raging and in tears, repeating over and over: ”I need nothing; […]
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The discussion was light, or so I thought. Until I mentioned that one thing that ignites his rage.  Doesn’t matter what it is, does it? We all have it – that tender spot of unresolved emotion. There was no more talking to him, so I moved on; finishing a task I had previously started. But now my anger flared. He […]
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Conceived in the midst of unbearable psychological drama, I was the reason for my mother’s marriage to my father – a relationship that would cause us all great pain over the years. Many losses would follow – deaths of grandparents and a favourite uncle, two fires resulting in the loss of five children.I grew up […]
Read MorePerhaps Gothic Horror or Psychological Thriller? Read the whole piece.
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Acknowledgment, they say, is a valid human need,yet, humility is a virtue…how do we balance the two? (Art my own)
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I ask my three-year-old self to show me her home, and she points to the floor beneath the formica-topped table in the kitchen. There, caged within the chrome legs of table and chairs, she is out of the path of adult legs, whose movements are as unpredictable as their moods. I ask my four-year-old self […]
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