Newsletter Therapy

Hey Reader! It's dark. I mean, the sun is up, allegedly, but the sky is a deep dull gray and turning on every light in the house is hardly enough to engender the idea of "daytime". And yet - it is a weekday and one on which I am supposed to be getting sh*t done. 🤗 My family is off celebrating our very non-religiously-affilliated Christmas 🎄without me. At home, all alone, I had such high hopes of getting the house clean! And getting up early! And generally being super productive. While also...

Hey Reader! Here's a short list of the sports I tried when I was a kid but quit after a season: Tennis, ice skating, competitive swimming, gymnastics. What can I say, I love to try new things! My mother’s constant refrain was that if I wasn’t immediately good at something I threw in the sweaty towel. She wasn’t wrong. And more practice would have made me much better at all those things. But as a probably-undiagnosed-ADHD kid I didn’t have the capacity to go deep into something that didn’t...

Hey Reader! I’m taking a break from newsletter advice this week to get all bossy about something new. Shopping. If you know me well, you might be wondering why I’m giving advice about something I dislike so much. I’ll tell you: I spent years helping people declutter their homes and offices and calendars and lives. And the number one way to battle clutter? Avoid bringing stuff into your home to begin with. The holidays are upon us, and gift-giving is the celebratory activity we seem to be...

Hey Reader! Talking about the weather is a trope, right? Like, the most boring conversation of all time? In college my friend Valerie and I used to make fun of our parents for bringing the weather into every conversation. 🙄 I mean, for real. Didn’t they have anything interesting to say? My family was stuck in gray, blustery New Hampshire while we lived and learned in gorgeously sunny Colorado. They were likely angling for a chance to remind me that their weather was pretty much always worse...

Hey Reader! I fell into a wormhole of the time-warp variety over the weekend. The setting was Eugene, Oregon, where I misspent a chunk of my youth with a cast of characters who all deserve their own reality shows. It was a reunion of sorts, though that term is generally used by an organization of some kind (family, high school, summer camp) and this was more a collection of people who used to hang out together. The surreality of spending time in a place I no longer inhabit with people I no...