BREATHE N BOUNCE

I Tracked Every Time I Felt Like Crap for a Week , Here's What I Learned I kept telling myself I was having a “bad week.” That phrase is convenient, isn’t it? A bad week. A weird mood. A little tired. Kind of stressed. Not sleeping great. Scrolling too much. Snapping at people for breathing near me. Very scientific. But I had a suspicion that “bad week” was actually several different things piled on top of each other. Poor sleep. Too much phone time. Not enough movement. Anxiety I kept pretending was just productivity. Irritability I blamed on everybody else, because obviously the entire planet was being annoying specifically to me. So I decided to track it. Not with an expensive wellness retreat. Not with a $300 subscription that sends me inspirational notifications written by somebody named Sage. I used a notebook, a pen, and the deeply radical practice of paying attention to my own life. For seven days, I tracked my energy, anxiety, irritability, sleep, and scrolling. I...

  We make investments in life all the time. And just like in the stock market, sometimes they are bulls, and sometimes they are bears. The market goes up, the market goes down. It is the job of the stock trader to be able to speculate what it's gonna do and at what point, so they know what the next move to make with the investment is. The same is true of life investments. Sometimes we might invest five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years into a relationship, only to find out maybe it was not a good one. And it's very easy to say I fucked up, and harder to walk away. But the difficult thing is when love is in the picture. You see, when two people are together, the vulnerability is something else. You expose yourselves to each other. You tell each other your deepest, darkest secrets. You see each other in a way the rest of the world doesn't. Chances are you probably will be naked in front of each other, and that's intimacy in its rawest form. And then ...

The Kids Went Back to School and I Finally Cried in Peace: A Parent's Guide to the September Letdown The first morning went surprisingly well. Nobody could find a shoe, obviously. Someone forgot a water bottle. Someone else suddenly remembered a form that needed to be signed right now , as if the school district had personally been waiting for our family to get its act together. But eventually, somehow, everyone got out the door. Then the house went quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Not immediately, anyway. More like the strange, ringing quiet after a concert when your ears are still trying to figure out what happened. I stood in the kitchen with a cold cup of coffee, a backpack-shaped dent in the couch cushion, and absolutely no idea what to do with myself. So I cried. Not a graceful, cinematic tear rolling down my cheek while I stared meaningfully out the window. No. I cried the way a person cries when they have been holding everything together for months and their nervous syst...