Early in May, I finished typing up all the handwritten pages for my book. I hadn’t been keeping track and I knew I was starting to repeat some of the stories I’d written. Writing in a non-linear way has been working for me, but suddenly it seemed like the words were getting unruly. When I typed the last handwritten page and compiled the entire document, it totaled 33,800 words in 89 pages. That’s a lot of words and a lot of pages. I felt like I was losing control of them. I sent them to …
literary happiness project
Why I’m Writing a Book (and What Exactly It Means to Me)
When I talk about writing a book and what I’m doing, I always say this: It’s like cleaning your closet, when you have to pull everything out and look at it to see what’s there and decide what’s going back in. You make a mess, assess what you have, then put back what you plan to keep. That’s how I’m approaching this book. One of the hardest things for me to explain is that I’m writing this book. If someone asks me what my book is about, the easy answer is it's a memoir. It's about my life. But …
Waiting for Things to Grow: April Recap
April was a behind-the-scenes kind of month. It was filled with solitude and soul searching. I spent time sitting on the couch staring out the window at the empty lot across the street from my house, eyes squinting for yellow blossoms of daffodils. I’ve wished for the sun to spread its fingers across the floorboards, for the rain and gloom to stop. I’ve waited for something new to emerge. That’s how it’s felt inside me too—the waiting, the wishing. Most of this year, I’ve been forcing it. …
Things Take Time: March Recap
At the end of each month, I’ve been reading over my journal entries with a highlighter in my hand. I spend most mornings writing a couple of pages, working my thoughts out or trying to capture what I’m feeling that day. Usually, day after day of writing, a theme starts to emerge. I say the same things over and over, and as I reread what I’ve written, those are the things to pay attention to (and highlight). What I wrote about most in March is depth—how hungry my soul is for deeper things, how …
When You’re Hungry for Something Deeper
I hadn’t been to a Monday morning yoga class for months, but one particularly bad day in March, I found myself on the mat with my toes together, head pressing down in child’s pose. Then, the tears started. The second my forehead touched the floor, I started to cry. And because I was face down, my eyes filled with tears quickly and there was no way to stop it. I blinked and they splattered on the mat. I closed my eyes again, but they keep coming. “Set an intention for your practice today,” …