The note on the mirror
My friend is trying to complain less. So he taped a note to his bathroom mirror. It says: complain less. At first this struck me as intentional. He noticed something about himself. He decided to change it. He put it somewhere he’d see it every single morning, before the day …
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The problem with: “Life is happening for you”
I met a girl on the Fourth of July. Twenty-two. Already divorced. Married just a few months before her husband disappeared. He just upped and left her. She told me the whole story. And the entire time, she was reaching for gratitude. Even though I could sense the raw heartbreak …
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What I learned in acting class
A few weeks ago I spent five days in an acting workshop. My first time taking an acting class. I didn’t know what I was walking into. I’m a writer. A speaker. I work with words on a page and a room full of faces. Standing in front of strangers …
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A Year and a half
A year and a half. That’s how long I’ve been working on my book proposal. This is not the speed I normally go. I rush out of the gates with excitement, never stopping to look back. This project started that way too. The first month, I had a proposal completely …
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Create distance to see clearly
Something goes wrong and there’s a feeling in my body before any of the facts are in. A quiet sinking. Of course. Of course it was me. The deal fell through. The friend went quiet. And before I’ve even looked at what actually happened, the verdict is already in. The …
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A new doorway
I love open houses. Not because I’m shopping. I rarely am. I go because I want to stand in someone else’s life for a few minutes and feel what it would be like to wake up here. To make coffee in this kitchen. To watch the light come through these …
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Reclaiming fear through reverence
I was five, maybe six. The crack in the cliff was about three feet across. The drop below it was twenty. I jumped. I didn’t know if I’d clear it. I jumped anyway. Because I wanted to belong, and the currency that I thought mattered was fearlessness. Flinching disqualified you. …
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Room for the body
You cannot be embodied if there is no room in your calendar for your body. It’s almost too simple to say out loud. And yet I keep watching us try to find a way around it. A little tweak here. A little adjustment there. A new morning routine. A different …
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Down to the studs
There’s a house on my street I walk past every day. Right now, it’s been taken down to the studs. No exterior walls. No interior walls. Just the bones of it, standing there in the open air. You can see straight through it, from one side of the lot to …
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Reaching back across the Potomac
The Uber crossed the Potomac river, and something in me cracked open. I was on my way into DC last week to give a keynote. I hadn’t really been back since graduating with my MBA from Georgetown University in 2009. Three quick visits in seventeen years. And now here I …
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