all you need for love To love someone, in my continuously evolving view, is a) to want to understand them, b) to want to facilitate them to meet their needs and c) to want to play with them. Let’s break that down: understanding Firstly, we acknowledge that you cannot fully understand this turbulent, chaotic ocean…
On their blog, adrienne maree brown (amb) writes of the importance of articulating what we want and do not want in our interactions with other humans: When you feel something come up that you want to say but you’re scared to say, you’re on the precipice between the lie of omission and the bravery of…
First, I was infatuated with the anticipation, the novelty, the courtship you offered, and the best self you put forward, as we all do in the early stages of a relationship. Then, we no longer shared a casual connection, but we didn’t know what had taken its place. I felt the low hum of a…
The poet Philip Larkin was a cynic at the best of times, particularly around the role of parents. He is known to have said that his parents’ relationship taught him two things: a) that people should not live together and b) that children should be taken from their parents at an early age. In his…
I hypothesize that underlying every “how to” themed article is a dark secret (other than than those that I write, I know it to be the case for me). We don’t write these articles because we have definitively perfected the art of XYZ, we write these articles because we are still in the throes of…
Showing up consistently to do what is necessary to not engage in your most damaging behaviours. This is what recovery looks like. I want to address two stereotypes about recovery in this post: Bulls**t. Most of the work required for long-term recovery for most people does not happen in the container of an in-patient clinic.…
We’ve all heard of that book. I hold issue with most of self-help literature. It seems all too often to constitute a set of directions that the author, in their perceived (or perhaps, simply publishable) sense of success and satisfaction, retrospectively believes that they followed to get there. Even if those directions did lead to…
Do people who run marathons know they don’t have to? I understand this point of view. For us fanatics, marathon training and racing is a serious undertaking, but it lacks a serious purpose. It does not demand any of our time or energy, and yet we expend both profusely for the purposes of covering 26.2…
I am a part of all that I have met. And all that I have lost is a part of me. Grieving is the process of processing loss. This process is both difficult and necessary. Grief is an oscillation in our minds that vacillates rapidly with great peaks and troughs at first, and hopefully decays…
When I lived with my parents as a child, they were in the habit of ordering an annual skip to dispose of junk. Some years construction materials filled up most of it, but there was always space reserved for the ‘crap’ families such as our own accumulate over time. Crap that once served a purpose…