A need to scoop out every square inch of fat and softness from inside my skin floods me, like how you can’t help scraping the last fingertip of peanut butter out of the jar. My hands, detached and ghostly, wrap relieved around my own tautening body as it narrows and wanes. My firm grip folds me into a packed wad, scrunched up like a spitball, small as not-even-physically possible, squeezing hard, engaging my core. I get high off of every millimeter by which I can reduce myself in space. The pressure on my palms from holding

Two parents, only in their twenties at first, before everyone believed in therapy. A church. The television (but I turned out alright.) Family friends who fed us Kix and carob and on whose swing set I sliced open the gentle pad of my pinky finger. …

If my life is a ship I’m too often below deck. Can’t see what’s rocking, can’t measure the waves by any gauge set. I think I’m gonna be sick in the heart, in the guts is where I was taught truth is. But seeing is believing (I also heard someone say) so I clamber to the crow’s nest. Look how small the waves are, how far away from land you really are.

God showed up in my kitchen last night while I was chopping Brussels sprouts. At first I thought it was my husband, but he usually says hello. Then I worried I’d cut my finger, but it was only a flash of red nail polish dark enough in the kitchen light to look like something coming from a vein. Thankfully everything that was supposed to stay inside me stayed inside me, especially since God was there.

According the story I grew up with, the world started in a garden. It was a perfect place, full of lush vegetation, inhabited by two innocent people and every kind of animal. Well, it was almost perfect. One of the animals — the snake — had a plan to trick…

Learning I Need to be Nice to Myself (Despite All Messages to the Contrary) If you were to create a bar graph comparing the frequencies of the different types of compliments I’ve received over the course of my life, the column for “polite” and all its synonyms would tower over the other affirmations like the Burj Khalifa soars over Dubai. When my mother took…

I’m currently reading through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It’s a book I started for the first time about five years ago, but I didn’t get too far into it before I met the man who would eventually become my spouse and I got distracted. You know how it goes…