Category Archives: writing

Things have changed since you cracked my spine and settled into your beanbag chair.

Posted on April 30, 2012 | 3 Comments

This life is a book I can’t put down.

But half my readers would rather skip the part that says, “God is good,” and head straight for “The Downfall.”

In fact, they’d probably shake my by my shoulders and say there simply isn’t enough controversy in these pages to warrant any sales. To warrant a life worth living.

And I would spin them around, nudge them toward Self Help & Addiction and Jodi Picoult’s moral dilemmas and tell them they’ve come to the wrong spot in the bookstore, baby.

Because we itch our stocking and the backs of our necks when someone starts throwing words like Newness and Next Chapter around like they are good. Like progress is a problem.

The only problem is I can’t please you all.

My life isn’t a bookstore. It’s just one book in the Coming of Age section.

I am just a girl learning how to sign up for a health care plan and stock her own pantry and live in an apartment alone for the first time since you cracked my spine and settled into your beanbag chair.

And must I remind you that was twenty-two years ago? That the books we loved then are not the same as now?

It’s true that we get giddy about new chapters, but we all have different expectations for them.

She wants me to stay rooted in the Somewhere Safe she knows well, would rather I stretch to a 600-pager. I am ready to wrap this chapter up and Epilogue that sucker.

Start a new book that begins, “And then she learned how to live alone…”

Because I will. And it will not be your story. Or your mother’s. Or your best friend’s. Or your hairdressers. It will be mine. Just for me.

Maybe that sounds selfish. Us writers, we scribble stories stuck inside our heads. We are gray-seers and world-dwellers. We are so ready to scramble into the back of someone else’s car and land out butts in Charleston, South Carolina because something told us we should Begin Again.

I’m not asking you to pick me up in the middle of Chapter 22 and fall in love.

I’m just asking that someone, somewhere, have faith that I know what I’m writing today and tomorrow but in ten years? No, no no. That is for ten years from now to worry about.

We envision endings and Life Happens and a couple people read on to find out if that picture stays the same, if we learn how to not burn our grilled cheese or overflow the toilet. If we stock clogging the vacuum and if we always look like a mess when it rains all day.

But we cannot please the world. And if we could, what kind of life would that be? 

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Posted in being yourself, broken friendships, college, growing up, writing

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You deserve eyes that see playhouses in office stores and lessons in the way she fixes her coffee.

Posted on April 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

The checkout line at Staples taught me all I ever needed to stay afloat.

At nine and seven, my sister and I played Goldilocks in the desk chair section, spinning in circles on tall-backed leather monsters and flimsy neon plastic seats.

We thought success was a matter of buying the right equipment, the perfect pens, the most comfortable chair, the most prestigious ream of paper.

And in some ways, we were right.

We’d line up behind my dad in the checkout aisle, scanning the treasures at our level—neon arrowhead erasers and jars of hard pretzels and bags of Swedish fish.

But for some reason, our eyes always landed right on the lifesavers.

The minute we learned that—that lifesavers were something you found in the middle of all the world’s structure—something small and safe clicked inside us.

We’d ride home, pocketing those suckers in our cheeks for sometime later. And thirteen years later, I am pulling that lesson back out for that Later.

It’s the reason I keep writing.

Yes, yes, there you are. Fingertips tracing the black on white words that are really only a series of one’s and zero’s. Really only a watered-down version of the beautiful ideas dancing around in my mind and pirouetting through the Staples aisles with my little sister.

Because what happens between Thursday and Monday and Thursday again is something quite magical. Sometime I’ve taken for granted for far too many weeks.

That the minute we start scouring the world for some lifesavers, some lessons to hoard in the backseat of our father’s favorite car, the one he someday sends us to the DMV with, we learn that they are all waiting for us.

Stamped with price tags and flashy promises about being So Good You Won’t Want To Put Them Down.

You won’t want to relinquish control on these gems of ideas that are just waiting the minute you look for them. The minute you train your brain to find the answers in the crevices between concrete slabs and the puckers in leather-backed chairs.

I hope you learn this lesson like you memorize the flavors of those lifesavers. Don’t you worry about getting greedy when you can’t choose between Wint-O-Green and Pep-O-Mint. Because you deserve both.

You deserve to know that lifesavers have been pushing themselves into our lives since 1912, when we realized the Titanic wasn’t resurfacing. That problems weren’t waltzing toward trash cans. That you deserve the feeling you get when everything makes sense.

You deserve one hand in each lesson, one lifesaver draped over each arm. You deserve eyes that see playhouses in office supply stores and lessons in the way she fixes her coffee.

That’s what this blog has brought me every single week. I cannot walk this world blind to the beauty lurking right here, right now, right at the end caps of the Staples shelves.

I hope you find it, too.

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Posted in imagine this world, writing

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We’re working toward meeting all the selfless souls stringing the streets of Manhattan with dreams.

Posted on April 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

Next time you tell me how to change the world, I’m going to stop you mid-sentence and ask you to go on a smoothie date.

Don’t get all frazzled by that invitation. Don’t dip your fingers into the sweet blended berries and smear it down my shirt like a reinvented version of Ann Hathaway’s “Princess Diaries” soft serve stunt.

Just hear me out, you wild world shaker. Because I am making friends in all kinds of places.

In Starbucks in downtown D.C. and in circled chairs in city churches. In front of Papa Johns pizza boxes and through computer screens in lonely hotel rooms.

And that is just this week, my friends. That is just the last six days of squeezing my smile into new conversations and shaking hands and learning names.

So when I propose a smoothie date mid-sentence, don’t you get offended. I’m just learning from the best and brightest.

On Tuesday night, amongst my pillows labeled with satin sashes for soft and firm, I hugged my Macbook Pro and livestreamed something spectacular – the Voice Your Verse poetry fundraising night.

I watched poets and world-shakers and change-makers and word-huggers all over New York City and beyond come together to honor She’s The First’s anthology to sponsor girls’ education in the developing world.

Mostly, though, I learned that there ain’t nothing wrong with meeting for smoothies and getting brain freezes amidst small wooden tables not nearly large enough to put our Big Ideas into perspective.

I learned that people you’ve never met in person can make you laugh so loud you worry your neighbors, the ones you’ll never share sugar with, are going to complain to the front desk.

I learned that when you’re freefalling toward failure, the first thing you need is a cold drink with someone who knows that side of the sidewalk so well from dwelling there long before you even knew what it meant. Long before you even knew to be scared.

And I am thanking this world for a woman I hope to someday shake hands with in front of a strawberry banana or a triple berry concoction. Someday swap stories of almosts and good enoughs and not have to count how many times we face-planted on pavement on the way to Something More. Someone Bigger. Someone Better.

I learned that we’re working toward meeting all the beautiful, selfless souls stringing the streets of Manhattan with dreams.

We’re holing up inside our houses clacking on keyboards to make connections that might last. Connections that might turn into smoothies and Starbucks and sweets baked together, shared in front of our own ovens. Late nights around a dimly lit kitchen table.

We are looking for someone who will not punch us in the face for asking for something as small as a smoothie date. Or a Starbucks run. Or a slice of pizza.

I hope we find each other. Somewhere out there. I hope we do.

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Posted in being yourself, Change Makers, writing

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How to save a life.

Posted on February 27, 2012 | 5 Comments

I want to travel backwards to a time before eating disorders. A time before bathroom scales. A time before mirrors.

The words spill into my eardrums as rain picks up and I run back to my car.

I know I am one of the lucky ones, one of the few who grew up with good food and a stable family and no reason to want to starve myself.

“A strange equation, and an altogether too-common belief: One’s worth is exponentially increased with one’s incremental disappearance.” – p. 4

Because of that, I was unprepared to handle catastrophe—not just one tidal wave, but rip currents lasting longer than the tide clock on the kitchen wall said they should.

I am a case study in the normal girl who plays hopscotch with abnormalities and dysfunctional habits on the playground because the recess aides weren’t paying attention.

But like riptide, it started, of course, with an undetected escalation. A bully here. Divorce there. Breakup here. Perfectionism there. New home here. Unhappy heart there.

And so I started pulling the Bad out of my life like Jenga pieces until my body became as rickety as that tower.

My problem, though, is that we don’t watch for the riptide. Even though it happens more often, we wait in quiet desperation for the storm to settle on its own. Sure the winds will calm, the waves ease.

The little girls flirting with the sticky foam will run inside for dinner.

That hasn’t happened. God, that has not happened.

“What probably happened is that, faced with a number of things in my life that I didn’t like, I turned to my eating disorder because I had never, ever figured out how to deal.” – p. 231

INSTEAD, I CHECK OUT A LIBRARY BOOK THAT’S HIGHLIGHTED AND STARRED AND BRACKETED AND UNDERLINED AND DOG-EARED.

I wonder—then wish I hadn’t—how many of its previous readers are still alive. How many of them got strapped into ambulance gurneys?

Another siren swings past my bedroom window and I wonder if its one of them—the girls whose bible made it into my bedroom.

I hug the book close to my chest all the way to the library elevator, avoid the librarian’s eyes while he searches a desk drawer for a bookmark with the due date on it. I stuff it into my backpack to learn these girls not through their own words, but through someone else’s.

I am learning why they are still alive. Why they picked it up. Why they skipped dinner. Why they stood on a scale in shame.

All by reading the defacement of public property, like tattoos bleeding the world’s injustices into my eyes, making me cry for girls I will never know, girls who may be dead if this Disease had its way with them.

This is why we do what we do. I am trying to learn—through a third-hand account—how to save a life.

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Posted in body haters, body lovers, love letters to young girls, writing

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January Discoveries

Posted on February 2, 2012 | 3 Comments

For those of you who aren’t familiar with my Discoveries series, each month I do a roundup of the things I loved most, the beautiful projects and ideas and videos I stumbled upon on this world wide web. January was so so good to me.

“Let It Go” by Eddy. First of all, she’s a rock star. Literally. But on top of that, this music video is a can’t-stop-listening message of empowerment that’s oh so catchy.

Start Something That Matters by Blake Mycoskie. Anyone who’s ever wanted to start a movement, a project, or give back needs to read this book. I read it in less than 36 hours, and the whole time I felt an itching to get up and make a difference.

Being Young And Making An Impact. This TED video tells the story of Natalie Warne, an 18-year-old who changed the world with a little bit of perseverance and a whole lot of sleepless nights. If you’re young and feeling like you have no voice, this is a must-watch.

John Green’s interview with NPR. Something about audio recordings by NPR get me. They just pull me back to a time when radio was the only means of entertainment. You can hear, in John’s voice, the genuine passion and commitment he has both to writing novels and his fan base. It’s refreshing.

Adam Braun’s Zeitgeist video. When Adam was 24, he founded Pencils of Promise, an organization that has shaped a new way of giving back. If you’re looking for purpose, he will hand it to you and make you do something to change the world.

How About We. This is a just-for-fun dating site that I found a few weeks ago, after someone posted about it on Twitter. Simple concept: post a date by ending the phrase “How about we…”

Simon Sinek‘s “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” on TED. This presentation explains why some companies and organizations are more innovative and successful than others. Anyone trying to start something or gain a following should consider their “why.”

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Posted in Change Makers, Discoveries, imagine this world, writing

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