Resilience Is Not the Same Thing as Being Unaffected I have mixed feelings about the word resilience. I love what it is supposed to represent: our remarkable human capacity to adapt when circumstances change, recover after difficulty, learn from experience, and continue moving forward when life looks nothing like the version we had planned. Somewhere […]
There is a particular silence that follows a cancer diagnosis. It carries the weight of a life reorganized around a word that used to belong to someone else. The phone call, the biopsy, the “we’ll have results soon.” The weeks after. I have referred to this in the past as the tornado that accompanies initial […]
Sleep Is Not Just Time When You’re Not Doing Anything There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep fixes. You stay up too late, the baby wakes up six times, you travel across several time zones, or you have one of those nights when your brain decides that 2:13 a.m. would be an excellent […]
Your Nervous System Was Never Supposed to Be Calm All the Time If you’ve spent any time in the wellness world lately, there is a reasonable chance someone has told you that you need to “regulate your nervous system.” Perhaps you’ve been encouraged to stimulate your vagus nerve, increase your heart rate variability, shake out […]
There are certain things about yourself that you don’t necessarily recognize as unusual until you’re old enough to realize that not everyone else’s brain works the same way. For me, one of those things has always been perfectionism. I was the student who wanted the assignment done correctly, but “correctly” wasn’t really enough. I wanted […]