I resist being controlled by others. I think this has been part of me since birth. Over time, that resistance became my comfort zone—because I am an only child. Being an only child meant I never had to share. I didn’t grow up competing for my parents’ attention;
Honestly, I’m tired of keeping up the appearance that I have life completely figured out. Keeping up appearances is exhausting. So I stopped. I deleted social media. Friends who unsubscribed from this newsletter? Meh. That’s okay. (Seriously. 😄) I think it’s time for us to find real friends—
And trials... they definitely came. After striking out in real estate, I decided to take some time off—volunteering, traveling, trying to listen for what was next. When that chapter wrapped, I thought: Alright God, time to get back to work. God had other plans. After 70+ job applications and
Most of life’s great moments are unplanned. I wasn’t planning on going to Rome. Maybe one day, when I retired. I definitely wasn’t planning to go there by myself. And I certainly didn’t plan on climbing stone stairs on my knees. Yet there I was—on
I didn’t grow up thinking about Joy. No teacher ever taught me to seek her out or recognize her. So I never noticed she was missing from my life. Mostly because I was taught something else entirely: make as much money as possible—and then, and only then, Joy
I might as well have an advanced degree in neuroscience. I live with bipolar depression. Before medication and therapy, that meant oscillating between feelings of self-brilliance (mania) and the crushing inability to get out of bed in the morning (depression). I didn’t know I was bipolar until the divorce.
Those words were printed on a doormat that greeted me every morning at my job with a national homebuilder—a somewhat painful reminder that I no longer had a home. Divorce had struck. The life I had painstakingly built over fifteen years had come crashing down. It’s hard to
Why I decided to stop drinking coffee.
Now that we’re in 2026, I wanted to take some time to look back on 2025 as I finally get around to launching this newsletter—something that’s been on my heart for quite a while. What do you do when you get divorced and find yourself spending New