I first found it when working at camps with young children. When I was seventeen, I volunteered at a horse vaulting camp. My group was full of little girls, aged seven and eight, who had to learn how to do tricks while riding horses. One girl in my group suffered from serious phobias, including a...
There’s too much pain surrounding this post to speak in general terms. I must keep it metaphysical, and perhaps it will reach a deeper level than my usual explanatory language. It’s discouraging to learn that, to quote a poet: “how you see it from where you’re sitting, it’s probably 110% different....
Repost: this article is highly problematic - the first few sentences demonstrate how the young children in my family were traumatized and lived in fear. My response to being overwhelmed was to dissociate. I've preserved it because it is a good example of how I once responded to stress. Zechariah woke up disconcerted,...
Guys, I’m happy. Usually on my birthdays, I slip into an introspective, rather melancholy, thoughtfulness about life. Something in my mindset changed in the past year: I don’t think about dying young anymore. I still live each day as if it will be my last. But I don’t imagine some kind of...
I’m heading up my writer’s group for the first time, and I had to lead a discussion last week. My theme: discovering the subconscious. I taught my friends a few things I’d learned about waking up my imagination before trying to describe a vivid scene, and then we practiced jam writing. My...
This post was originally published October 5, 2012. For an update on how I feel about Christianity now, see the post “When God Spoke to Me.” This is part of the archive restoration project. From a young age, my mom taught me to force a smile when I don’t feel like it. She explained...
