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Monthly Archives: December 2017

The Art of Apologizing

I’ve messed up a lot in my life and I’ve hurt a lot of people. Many of those people I’m no longer in contact with, and will probably never apologize to. And now, although I can’t think of the last time I intentionally tried to hurt someone else, I still do it far more frequently than I wish I did. Bottom line, human relationships are messy. Even if you try to never offend or upset anyone ever and coat all your words in sugar-honey-molasses-toffee and say whatever you think the other person wants you to say…you will upset someone sometime. And also that sugary business sounds exhausting and requires a lot of mind-reading. Which is a skill I do not possess at the time of this writing. Combine all the accidental-offense giving with all the times I just plain make stupid mistakes, like paperwork errors, forgetting to respond to an email, or forgetting to pick something up at the store, and what you have is a moderate-sized stew of human error. Fortunately, I can cope with that. Here’s how: I know how…

Things My Parents Did Right

While there was certainly a time I could never imagine thanking my parents for anything, that time is fortunately long gone. Certainly becoming a mother has had something to do with that, as has the very gradual development of my frontal cortex. And now I can appreciate many of the brilliant and selfless things they did for me.

However, in an age when children playing kick the can until the streetlights turn on is a nostalgic vision from the past, I can truly appreciate that aspects of my childhood were charmed…

How to Be Yourself (Even When You Don’t Know Who You Are)

It’s one of the most cliche cliches out there: Just be yourself. I remember being told this once and thinking, “What does that even mean?” and “Yeah, but who exactly is this self that I am supposed to be?” Whether you are in the stage of identity-development of trying to decide on a persona to play or of slowly shedding the many personas/identities/egos you’ve accumulated, not knowing who you are is pretty normal. Furthermore, most of us (myself absolutely included) are so used to playing predefined roles in the majority of interactions that authenticity is hard to even wrap our heads around. Like what would that even look like? If you hate someone, do you have to tell them? Does it mean you shout, “please, leave the sick bastard!” in the middle of a movie theater in response to the heroine’s obviously terrible choice of a romantic partner? Because that’s how you feel? Well, responding authentically “as ourselves” is something that is fluid and cannot be easily defined. Obviously. But obviously, by the fact that I am writing this post, I…