My partner and I have recently moved to a very red state with equally red dirt.
I was nervous to move here, having spent my entire lifetime trying to distance myself from hateful, aggressive, sweaty men at family dinners and church events and what-have-you.
But alas, the previous state we lived in was reddish purple anyway and I was tired of shoveling snow and trying to feel alive again by taking scalding hot showers and giving bae a heart attack every time he saw the water bill.
Read MoreI recently explained my relationship with my father with this metaphor: It’s as if I’m putting a piece of my soul into a vending machine, pressing the button for Cheetos, and instead receiving a pile of dusty bran.
Angry dusty bran.
Angry dusty sentient bran that is somehow also a next-level expert in gaslighting.
My journey to understanding my father first began with therapists, then textbooks, then internet rating scales entitled “He might be a sociopath if…”
Read MoreSociety asks us to consider others and do our part to keep things chugging along with as few disruptions as possible.
Don’t talk with your mouth full of tater tots.
Offer your seat to someone else who could use the rest.
Definitely don’t microwave fish in the break room.
These things are niceties that generally ensure the comfort and care of our fellow humans.
But sometimes, society and systems ask things of us that are not comfortable and require us to bury parts of ourselves in order to maintain the comfort of others.
Read MoreEmpathy is the foundation of real human connection, but there is a big asterisk here.
Some of us who identify as empaths or “feelers” might have a hard time not taking the full weight of the heavy thing and putting it on our own shoulders.
We try to help others by absorbing their trauma and in a way, making it our own. This is evidence of great love and good intentions for our friends, as well as flimsy boundaries that reveal our own wobbling self love.
Read MoreThe only solution to drag yourself out of a limited perspective, sense of hopelessness, or feelings of stuckness, is to take a blind step.
Your foot will hit something, and it might just be the first step in the direction of the life you’ve always envisioned.
Your path is there, and it’s waiting for you to trust yourself enough to take it.
Read MoreAs you likely know from experience, designing boundaries is not an easy task. It comes with second-guessing yourself, a lot. "Am I being dramatic?" "What if I tell this person I can no longer have them in my life, and they come back in a few weeks or months healed?" "Will I feel stupid for drawing a boundary?"
This second guessing can be frustrating, but I'm here to tell you it's actually a good thing. If you're working on setting boundaries and second-guessing yourself, it means you are thinking through all of your potential options and outcomes - which effectively means you are not being dramatic or impulsive in your choices.
Read MoreLet's start with this fact: Imposter Syndrome is a "syndrome," "complex," or "phenomenon," because it is something you believe or a feeling you embody.
It's not called, "Imposter Identifier" or something that automatically equals truth.
Read MoreSo you've tried a few therapists, but haven't felt like you're getting much out of therapy yet and you aren't really "clicking" with them.
Let me tell you from experience, this totally sucks. Check out these tips for ways to find a therapist you actually like to talk to!
Read MoreOne thing that took awhile (and several therapists) to learn is that your world is so big. When I learned this and understood it as the freedom that it was, I ran with it.
Your world is not your house. Your world is not your circumstance. Your world is not the people who send you the message that you can't.
Wanna get inspired? Read this post.
Read MoreTherapy can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It can mean a shopping trip (retail therapy), or a trip to your cabin Up North (lake therapy), or exercise therapy to work of energy and clear your mind when your thoughts are jumbled.
I'm here to talk about therapy, therapy. The kind where people imagine the person laying on a chaise-like couch and talking to a bearded man in a sweater vest who is taking copious private notes.
To be clear, that has not been my experience, but now you know the gist.
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