My best friend’s neighbor is dying. By the time you read this, likely, he’ll be gone. This boy is only twelve years old. Twelve. His loss is such a profound injustice to his family and friends and the natural order of things. My heart breaks each and every time I think of him and his parents. I have never met… Read more →
Category: The Not-So-Trivial
Silly Toy Company, Pills Are Not For Kids.
I take four medications each day. My husband also takes a couple. My four year old daughter, Delilah, has on more than one occasion expressed an interest in having her own “vitamins” like ours. I probably don’t need to tell you our medicine is stored high and out of reach. More than once, I’ve explained to her that while the “vitamins”… Read more →
Nirvana Unplugged.
Plugged. That’s how I’ve been feeling. The world has been spinning tragedy at breakneck speed, and all of it is delivered directly to my brain via the Internet, which I can’t seem to stop looking at. Even the good sometimes comes at me too quickly to bear. And this thing? This red tape covered, bucket-of-cold-water-to-the-face, no-do-overs adulthood thing? It has… Read more →
Back In The World Again; Thank You, #ClimbOut
It’s often that posts of mine get stuck in the mental pipeline behind other posts because I have this order of how things happened, and who I promised what to, and what it says on the editorial calendar Lindsey keeps trying to get me to use, and probably seven times out of ten those stuck in the pipeline posts never… Read more →
Postpartum Depression Can Eat My Dust: Climb Out of the Darkness 2014
Four years ago I wanted to die. I wasn’t suicidal, to be clear, I made no plans — I was just sort of okay with the idea of not being alive any more. The sheer act of living was harder than I’d ever expected it to be and some days — the worst days — despite having a bouncing bundle of reasons to live in my seven month old baby, I just didn’t think I could do it anymore. Read more →
Portrait of an Anxiety Spiral
It begins in my gut. What was that that bothered me? Shit. Now it’s in my chest but I still can’t remember what I stumbled across or thought about or saw that made me feel left out, forgotten about, less than. I wonder how I have any room for organs at all when my body is so filled with this… Read more →
The Internet Can Be Beautiful and Horrible and Confusing Sometimes, And So Can Life
If you’d asked me five years ago if I thought I’d ever meet someone “from the internet” I would have thought you were creepy and changed the conversation. There was a time when meeting people from the Internet was something I considered a one-way ticket to inspiring your own episode of Law & Order. But now? I can’t imagine my… Read more →
Coming Home: Surviving Culture Shock In Your Native Land
[Editor’s Note: I hope you guys will welcome Lindsey to The 818. She’s someone Scott and I both go way back with (Scott to birth, while Lindsey and I met early in High School). She’s on of those rare people in our lives whose relationship with each of us pre-dates our relationship together. And last year after she married Mike, who… Read more →
Stop What You’re Doing And Bring Back Our Girls.
There have been days of my life…so many days…when I’ve thought I had a bad life. When I’ve thought that this world in which I live comfortably with a roof over my head and food on my table and an education in my mind is anything other than one of privilege and abundance. That this incredible life in which I use that… Read more →
Things Scott Says: Portrait of Lotte Edition
You may have already seen the latest installment of Franz Hoffmeester’s ongoing project “Portrait of Lotte” in which we can now watch his daughter Lotte age from birth to 14 in a beautifully crafted and what many are calling “heartbreaking” four tiny minutes. But last night, when I showed it to my husband, (who — quick update — is currently… Read more →