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What Masks Do I Wear to Protect Myself From Rejection
Being married to me must sometimes feel like living with a 24-hour tone-and-expression surveillance system. He looks away while I’m mid-story? NOPE! Clearly, he doesn’t care. Says “Hmm” and nods after reading my work? That felt empty AF. He’s just pretending. Yawns while I’m talking? WAR. He thinks I’m boring. Cue the eye daggers, the…
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Do I let my dreams take away my joy and fulfillment instead of using them to inspire and energize me?
Every time I contemplate a question about my “dreams”, I think, “Do I even have a dream?” And every time, my mind goes to my childhood dream of becoming a famous singer. As I wrote, I realized that the way I handled my first dream is actually the same pattern that has played out in…
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In what ways does my inner critic distort my perception of who I truly am?
Every summer, I decide to become a person who has a garden. And every summer, I am charged with negligence causing death. The prosecutor is me. The sentence: a lifetime of intense, irrational fear of going into my backyard. I imagine Joyce, the neighbour behind me, with her beautiful tomatoes, looking at me with her…
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Am I ever masking selfish motives as a desire to help others?
A Category 5 storm hit my life in 2013. My 6-year-old daughter was sexually abused by a family member I had paid to babysit. That decision still haunts me. She endured a year of relentless flashbacks and the kind of depression no 6-year-old should ever face.
