What are you unwilling to feel?

I saw something wonderful recently about how creatives should never apologize for taking the space to create. How wonderfully, stupidly obvious is that? Whether it’s your work or your pleasure, creating grounds us, fills us, lets the most alive parts of ourselves enter into the world to further germinate and flourish.

“There are old people who only think about the past, but it’s not like that around here.” She leaned her cane on a rock. “You have to do things,” she reflected. “There’s always a future, even if it’s very small.”

Self-loathing is a rampant virus in our contemporary culture — so prevalent as to have become the default setting in most of our minds. Seldom do we even stop to question whether it is normal or healthy to live within a consciousness that is constantly attacking, judging, and insulting itself. But to condemn yourself as unlovable is to swallow a te... See more

I call these experiences our dark teachers. The lessons that hurt, scare, scar, wound, and almost destroy us are very often the things that make us who we are because they require us to muster what we thought we could not muster—courage, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love, resilience, strength, generosity of spirit, ferocity of heart. The time... See more

Perhaps confidence isn’t something to be built; it's right under the surface when that heavy bulk of needing to be someone is lifted. Embracing being no one helped me feel authentic and confident, which, in my opinion, is way cooler than any expensive-looking sweater.

If you’re actually serious about treating burnout — yours, your partners, your future children’s — you have to be serious about treating it for people you might not even know. If you want to actually make life better, more livable, less of a slog for yourself, that involves making it better for a whole lot of other people as well. For that, you don... See more

So philanthropy under this rubric is not about creating sanctuaries from or alternatives to the demands of capitalism. The benevolence, if you can call it that, is in giving people from the underclass a chance to succeed by its rules. With, of course, very patronizing and constraining surveillance from the funder. It’s neoliberal brainworms all the... See more