Can I let you in on a secret? When I try something new, I always assume I’m incapable of it. For example: after college, I worked as a technical writer for a consulting company. A local manufacturing facility wanted us to create a small- to medium-sized website for one of their departments. My boss told them I’d be …
Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect
I grew up practicing ballet—fifteen years of plies, pointe shoes and pirouettes. I played Clara in the Nutcracker, got a chance to dance with the San Francisco Ballet in junior high, and got a whole lot of blisters. Ballet is an exacting art form. One class I took was literally called “Perfection”. Every class, we eyed ourselves even …
The Law of Conservation of Willpower
At the beginning of this year, I realized I wanted to practice yoga more often. I subscribed to an online yoga service, and decided I’d just do fifteen- to thirty-minute routines. Since I have limited free time, I wanted to keep things simple. Adding just one little practice shouldn’t have affected much else in my life, …
Being a Beginner is Okay
Do you lie awake at night, worried that you’ve missed the mark in your life? Do you get frustrated with yourself about dealing with the same personal failure, again and again? Do you know if you weren’t so broken in x, y, or z areas of your life, you’d be much more successful? Are you …
A Back-to-School Sanity Check
Back when I had preschoolers, I used to get all judgy about overscheduling. People throw their children into too many activities, I sniffed. Those poor kids. And then my daughters hit elementary school and wham, I realized how exponential family time commitments were. If we say yes to two things, suddenly our calendar feels overfull. It’s incredibly hard …
Do You Wish You Could Change Your Story?
In April, my family and I went to New York City for a week. It was pretty epic. We went to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, clambered over giant boulders in Central Park, ate amazing ramen, pizza, and pastries, and (so lucky) we saw Matilda on Broadway. I loved Roald Dahl growing up, …
Why Little Yeses Change You
I’ve always tried to change my life. Ever since childhood, I made all kinds of self-help attempts. It usually started with getting a book. On organic gardening, couponing, volunteering, attachment parenting, personal finance or social justice. I’d make a resolution. Start to re-organize the house. Save money on groceries. Sign up to volunteer at hospice. …
For the One Who Procrastinates
At least once a week, someone I know remarks how organized I am. How tidy my house, how spotless my pantry, how early I make deadline, how on the ball I am. I wish I were that organized, women tell me. I should be more like you. I never really know how to respond to …
How To Seek A Tiny Bit Of Beauty Right Now: For SheLoves
Almost once a month in my twenties, I’d have a sickening crying jag, where my self-worth plunged into the toilet. If I’d been given a wish back then, I would have crumpled myself up like dirty Kleenex and demanded God start over. I want to be someone else, I’d think. I couldn’t have even told you why. …
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3 Questions for Your Best “Do Nothing” Day: For No Sidebar
It was the knot in my stomach that convinced me to rest. I’d started a blog a year before I noticed the knot. “Starting a blog” is code for “taking my decades-long dream of becoming an author seriously.” A year after I took the plunge, I’d made significant progress online. I felt so proud of …
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Goal-setting for people who hate goals
I talked recently about how different my life had become this year. The reason it changed is the list of goals I made last year. Not just a list, but a plan. I wrote down specifically what I wanted to concentrate on. I made each goal (mostly) something I could measure. I figured out tiny …
Are you more competent than you think?
When people learn I can speak Spanish, their first question is, “Are you fluent?” And for a long time, my answer was no. I speak Spanish well, I reasoned, but I was hardly fluent. If I have to tell a story about my hopes, dreams, fears in the past, I get tangled in the verb …
Six ways to conquer a terrifying first step
When you get stuck behind a mountain of fear, what do you do? Often I get frustrated I’m not just braving the terror, sucking it up, and moving forward. Lately, I’ve come to see that yelling at myself is not terribly helpful. And there’s more than one way to get up a mountain. With that …
Do you know how grateful I am for you?
Not long ago, I wrote here about platform. (For those of you who don’t speak marketing, that’s the readership and reach of a particular writer). Some of my readership goals had stalled out, and I was struggling with my bitterness and fear about success and failure. I got a bunch of kind comments, and also …
I’m Afraid of Seeming Forward: For SheLoves
“Forward:” it’s a Little House on the Prarie sort of word, isn’t it? A word from the days of long skirts and corsets and hair done up with pins. Forward is a woman who presumes too much. Who insinuates herself into unwelcome company. Or, worse, forward is a shameless, wayward woman. A woman transgressing. A woman crossing boundaries of politeness …
Sisterhood is a Practice: For SheLoves
I wanted to look forward to my older sister’s visit last year. But I was not entirely successful. It had been almost five years since Katie had last stayed at my house in San Diego. Lately, we’ve been growing closer, and last year I visited her a few times in Michigan. But her coming to …
The Biggest Hindrance to Creativity Isn’t Time: For The Mudroom
Before I had kids, I got a master’s degree in creative writing at San Diego State. I had quit my job as a technical writer not long before, and my husband earned enough that I didn’t need to work. So throughout my degree program, I had all day to write. You would think having that much time motivated …
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I Insist This Is A Love Story: For SheLoves Magazine
I insist this is a love story. I was twelve or 13, and I was in bed, crying, because earlier that day, I looked down at one of the desks I passed in class, and saw I hate Heather gouged into the wood with a blade. I was hoping my mom would hear my crying that night. …
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When “Career” Is a Messy, Beautiful Chaos
When I was twenty, I got a Rotary scholarship to go study literature at the University of Buenos Aires for a year. At the time, I only knew was that UBA was a public university with an excellent reputation. Later, I’d encounter its chaos: professors who chain-smoked without ashtrays in class, roving political party members soliciting …
The Boldness That Comes With Mutual Submission
I used to think that submission was passive. It’s why, working at the campus bookstore at my university, I ignored the shelves of women’s studies books, sure that picking up even one would mean not submitting to God’s design for me. It’s why, after realizing that women were not allowed to serve communion at my …
The Day I Regretted Writing for SheLoves—at SheLoves Magazine
The first time SheLoves Magazine accepted a post I’d written, I wondered if I’d made a mistake submitting it at all. Don’t get me wrong; I was proud of the essay. I’d also been reading SheLoves for a few months by then, impressed with their writers and their global outlook. SheLoves seemed like a good fit for my writing—if they’d take …
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Asking Questions Out Loud is Women’s Work
“Can you tell me what this verse means?” Ellen asked. She glanced at her Bible and read, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.” She looked up at the pulpit, where our pastor, a prematurely gray-haired man, stood during the …
Being a good girl hamstrung my calling
The email slipped into my inbox with no fanfare a few years ago. A name I didn’t recognize, a cryptic subject. Curious, I opened it, but it took me a minute to figure out what the woman who sent it was asking. Basically: I like your work. Have you ever thought of publishing a book? …
Why Does Twitter Terrify Me? for The Mudroom
Let’s start out with a confession: Twitter terrifies me. I got my handle a few years ago. The day my friend Melissa explained to me how she manages her twitter account, makes lists, what she posts, and what a hashtag is, my heart thudded in my chest, dully as I listened. It’ll get easier, I …