How to Build Resilience to Depression

I wrote this piece for the local newspaper! As we’ve attempted to settle into post-pandemic life, the mental health crisis continues to rage. According to a review by Boston University School of Public Health, rates of depression in the United States have risen from 9 percent, pre-pandemic, to 33 percent in 2021.  With depression affecting…

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My Wish For 2023

Last Fall I read My Side of the Mountain to River. It’s a novel about a boy who leaves the city to make a home in the woods on the site of his great-great grandfather’s failed farm. He builds a shelter by burning out the trunk of a great hemlock tree and he steals a…

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Week 12: Recovering a Sense of Faith

It’s 10:00pm and I’m finding myself doom scrolling the furniture section of the Anthropologie app. Doom scrolling because, what urgent need have I for an overpriced arm chair at this hour, when I should be sinking into bed under the ceiling fan’s gentle blow with my favorite audiobook humming me to sleep. All that the…

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Week 11: Recovering A Sense of Autonomy

Are your kids back in school yet? R doesn’t start until this Monday, but I’m already sorting through emails and filling out forms—even as I’m writing this I’m getting interrupted! And so it begins… (cue ominous Lord of the Rings music).  I’ve had a few people comment on my quantity of writing. How do you…

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Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion

[If you are just joining in, this is a book by Julia Cameron “a spiritual path to higher creativity”….Feel free to jump in or start back at the beginning. There are posts for each week (chapter)!] Today marks the start of the last month of Summer of Creativity. I hope you are seeing some changes…

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Week 6: Recovering a Sense of Abundance

I wanna take a minute to do a check in with how this Artists-Way process is going for me. So far, I’ve been totally solid on the morning pages because I was already really in the habit going into this. I have slacked on the artist date for the last couple of weeks. One week…

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I See Light Because I See Shadow

I cannot imagine a God, who created this world, filled with so much diversity, so much light and so much in the deep, to have meant for us to skim the surface, not when the landscape of human experience is so vast and rich. So this is a reminder, as much for me as anyone, do not neglect the shadow.

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Attention

I smell the ocean on the warm breeze flowing steadily past the skin on my face and arms, which are slightly sticky from the drying salt water. The sun is headed down but the days are long and it will be hours before it sets. There is a seagull walking past, eyeing the abandoned beach…

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I am terrified of the silence. 

As children of mothers with depression, we have to teach ourselves how to cry because there is danger in the sadness. It feels like giant cavern that could swallow me whole, a darkness that I might never escape. So I flitter around saying, I’m fine! I’m fine! and going to parties and talking and drinking…

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I am [after all,] my own muse.

It’s rare that something comes out of my morning pages that I actually care to publish or use in some other piece of work. But this came out a few nights ago. I didn’t get my morning pages done in the morning because I was working on some other things and by 9pm, I was…

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