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A meditation on the way trauma is held in the body—the quiet ways grief, heartbreak, and survival live in our muscles, our bones, and our breath. This essay explores what happens when we can finally listen as the body begins to speak.
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A personal inventory of pain I’m carrying right now—physical, emotional, spiritual—and a few things that help. Maybe it’ll help you name yours too.
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A personal reflection on maintaining open communication in marriage, emphasizing how silence and unspoken emotions create distance and misunderstandings.
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“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.” ― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer When you are sad, everyone wants to make you smile. When you can’t smile, they want to make you talk. And when you can’t talk, they want to make you listen—anything to keep you from feeling what you feel. They mean well. Their hearts are in the right place,…
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A reflection on remorse and the self-hatred that follows wrongdoings. Envisioning a new understanding of myself as a person who can hurt others and searching for a self-love that encompasses the whole, flawed self.
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If you had an extra hour every day, how would you spend it? I think the one thing almost all adults have in common is the feeling that there is never enough time to get everything done that you hoped to. The to-do lists get longer, and the hours get shorter. You wake up, work, and then spend your free time getting ready to go to work again. Somewhere inside, you think, you feel, you know that this isn’t the way it should be, but you look around and everyone is living life like you, and they say nothing at…
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Isn’t it a miracle that we’ve ended up as ourselves? My youngest sister is always trying so hard to become someone. I have tried, but I still haven’t found the right way to explain to her that no one ever really becomes a final someone. You never stop becoming. I want her to know that who you are is not a final, permanent product but an ever-growing, changing, transient thing. I try to think back to when I was her age, fifteen years ago—a lifetime. I see me as I was then, and I can see me in her as…
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How do you dream big? When I was growing up, I never heard the adults around me speaking in future tense. Everyone around me seemed too busy coping with their past or simply surviving the present. My parents in particular, spent almost all their waking hours working to keep food on the table, a roof over our heads, and clothes on our backs. When they weren’t doing that, they slept, they fought, they cried, they yelled, and sometimes worse. My whole childhood felt like running from one crisis right into the next. There was never any time to think about…
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Are you saving time or wasting it? No matter how early I wake up, I’m always late for work. I’ve tried getting ready the night before, but I still find myself confused about the next steps. I’ve tried waking up earlier, but it seems the more time I have the later I am. I’ve tried lists, timers, and alarms and still every morning I’m rushing, feeling like a failure again. When I look back, I can’t always pinpoint when I went wrong, but typically it’s a simple distraction. I was watering the plants instead of making my lunch. I decided…
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“if someone called you right now to catch up, what’re the things you’d tell them about?” If I called you right now to catch up, it might surprise you to hear from me after such a long time away. I would say the things that everyone says. I would say I was sorry I hadn’t reached out. I would say it wasn’t you, but the work hours that have grown longer and the hours leftover that get shorter and shorter all the time. If I called you right now to catch up, I would say I have been tired, that…
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The summer is more than half over now, but instead of letting the looming end depress me, I’m feeling a sense of pride this time. This summer has been my summer. Nothing particularly big has happened. On the surface, my life looks nearly the same as it did in the spring, but something is different, something unseen, in me. Life suddenly feels deeper, wider, and more real. I’ve changed. I continue to change into myself. I’ve been reading again. It’s been my goal for a while to read more from Kazuo Ishiguro, so I picked up Klara and the Sun.…
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I woke up already exhausted by the day ahead. After the alarm sounded, the most I could manage was a few steps toward getting ready for work before I was back in bed. I’d lost control of my body. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I couldn’t convince my feet forward, and the longer I lay there, the harder it got to change course. After a while, I was forced to accept that I just couldn’t do it. I stayed home. I’ll admit I probably could have toughed it out, but I saw no benefit in doing so. I’ve come…
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“You are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing” — Sufi proverb
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“Her nervous system had been through so much. She decided to spend the rest of her life calming the inflammation. Thoughts, feelings, memories, behavior, relations. She soothed it all with deep, Loving breaths and gentle practices. The softer she became with herself, the softer she became with the world, which became softer with her. She birthed a new generational cycle: Peace.” — Dr. Jaiya John, Fragrance After Rain
Lisa Marie Blair 