It usually starts with widened eyes and a slight lift of the eyebrows. As I walk over to greet a new student, they slowly stick out their hand to meet mine. “Hi, I’m Anna. I’m so glad you’re here!” “Hi,” they say back. “You’re the … teacher?” Most of the time when people come to […]
Whenever anyone asks my mother what I was like as a child, she always responds by telling stories of her first attempts to put me in a dress as a toddler. “I would just finish dressing her and she would be looking like the cutest little princess,” she usually relays, “After I turned my back for […]
The irony about people who cope with depression is that some of us are actually quite happy people. We are not, contrary to stereotype, slogging through life with the weight of one thousand sorrows dragging behind us. I may feel things intensely, sure. But I’m not someone whose blue-colored glasses see everyone screwed up and the […]
We’ve been seeing each other for years; short, weekly sessions that often leave me enlightened, teary-eyed, or with a skip in my step. Ours is one of the most gratifying relationships I’ve ever had, defined by an openness and comfort level that allows for complete honesty. It took a little while to get there and […]
One day as I was walking around the city, a few hours after I’d peed on a stick in my office toilet and that tell-tale plus sign came up, it dawned on me that every single person I was passing—every single old man, young child, bored teen, chubby woman, skinny fashionista, homeless guy, what have […]
Ughhhhh, he is infuriating, I thought as I scanned Paul*’s Facebook page. There were new status messages — “carboloading” — a recent video of him performing, and links to new posts on his blog. Facebook told me what parties Paul had recently attended and which ones he had just RSVP’d to; it told me “Paul […]
In my book, The Harm in Asking, one of the chapters, “The Boogie Rhythm,” is dedicated entirely to the topic of farting. To be a bit more specific, it is all about what we, as women, go through when it comes to our gas. In the run up to the book’s release I’ve done a […]
“The commute is killing me,” I said, tears streaming down my face. My live-in boyfriend Jeff looked at me, puzzled. I couldn’t blame him. The way I behaved when I got home from work every day was, well, puzzling. After a 12-hour work day as a high school teacher and a two-hour commute home through […]
What do you do when one of the things you used to like about yourself the most, looking back, becomes one of the things that you like about yourself the least? From as young as I can remember, a rocket ship of ambition propelled me forward in all that I did. I didn’t — and still […]
