This past weekend was the tipping point for the #100dayproject. We’ve crossed the halfway mark, and now we’re on the back end, the downward slope. That feels like relief, but I know I’m still squarely in the messy middle. This is the hard part. This is where the trust comes in, that this is a worthwhile project and not a giant waste of time. I’ve had a hard time believing that, especially last week. I found myself sitting down and writing terribly just to check the box and say I did it. …
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Lent and Imperfection on the Bonding Time Podcast
This essay was originally published in 2017. Listen to me read it aloud here. At breakfast this morning, my husband reminded me that today is Mardi Gras. He walked to the kitchen to make a second French press of coffee, and I got distracted by the sun coming through the back window and hitting me in the face. “You know,” I said, “I’m really sick of this house.” He came back to the table and replied, “Yes, I know.” I had mentioned this to him last week. The kids were off school for …
What Do You Want from Instagram?
“Every child is an artist,” said Picasso. “The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” As a lonely kid sitting on the couch with a pile of blank paper, I drew all the time—while I watched TV, while I waited for my mom to come home, in downtime at school. What I drew was people, mostly cartoons, then I wrote their stories and typed them up on my grandmother’s old typewriter. I went to the school book fair and bought a book called Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. On the cover …
The Scary Freedom of Ten Minutes a Day: A 100 Day Project Update
When I decided to do the #100dayproject at the end of January, I wanted to make it as easy as possible, though that’s not really my nature. I like big challenges. I like going all in. But I knew if I did something too big this year, it would likely crush me. So, I kept my ideas small, then made them even smaller. The idea I came up with—time lapse videos of me freewriting for ten minutes a day—was the simplest thing I could think of. It required me to write (which was my goal), but not to …
Never Explain: A Story of Grief and the Heart
It was Julia Child who famously said, “Never apologize. Never explain.” She was talking about cooking and how to handle the inevitable situation of screwing up dinner, but the advice applies to almost anything. When I apologized for something ridiculous I did online a million years ago, a friend sent this quote to me and encouraged me to stand my ground, a lesson I needed to learn to navigate the internet and a writing life as much as anything else. A few months ago, I wrote that quote in my …