New Post at Medium: I Saw the Sign

"Everyone knows the signs. There are hundreds of books, websites, videos, dedicated to them: flickering lights, unexplained touches, items in the house disappearing, temperature changes in the room, dreams visits, audible hallucinations, shadows. The list goes on and on of ways that your loved ones are attempting to contact you from beyond the land of the living, letting you know they’re okay. In the almost two years since my mother died, I’ve never seen a sign. " 

 To read more, go here.

She's Not There

Losing friends is hard. I don't have anything soothing or pithy to say about it. It just sucks. Although as a writer, I can't not write about it. I wrote something on Medium:

A long-time friend passed away yesterday. Although she had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer almost a decade ago, I never quite thought she would die.

To read more, to here.

New Work in The Coffeelicious

Excited to have an excerpt of a novel I'm playing with in The Coffeelicious this week!


She clamped the lid tightly and pushed the button vreevreevree and the fruit was pink frothy soup, no pain, not like boiling a lobster, no anger at her for her betrayal. And if she did not drink it? Someone would come behind her — he would come behind, and put it in the refrigerator, thinking she would drink it later, or even pour it down the sink, if he’d ever had a thought to housekeeping, and no one would be any the wiser.

To read more, go here.

"Thank You, 2015" at Medium

A small essay on why I'm grateful for 2015 today at Medium:

"Thank you, 2015, for a grateful year. I am grateful for loss, because it’s made me thankful for what I have. I am grateful for personal rejections I’ve received, for they’ve made me have to love myself more..."

To read more, go here.

The Anniversary Gift: What I Learned a Year After My Mother’s Death

I have a new essay today in Medium, "The Anniversary Gift: What I Learned a Year After My Mother’s Death":

A numbness, a void, had grown over my pain, burying me deep underneath. But slowly, the silk began to loosen, and someone different emerged from the cocoon. Before my mother died, I was a scared person, a worried person. I worried about what people thought of me; I was afraid to make a mistake, to be less than perfect. I felt responsible for everyone and everything and spent an inordinate amount of energy trying to fix broken people, fucked-up situations, to make myself indispensable. My entire self-worth was tied up in this belief. In that deep void, however, I discovered that the person I’d been neglecting all these years was me.

To read more go, here.

New Essay at Medium: Surviving Chaos

I have a new essay at Medium called "Savoring Chaos." Thanks to Sandra Bullock, for her inspirational quote about the sometimes heartbreaking nature of life. It's stuck with me through the incredibly thin times of the last year or so.

Look at it this way: Not accepting what has happened will not change what has happened, and even if you plan ahead and buy a spare set of contacts, your house might burn down because your neighbor left a candle burning and everything you once owned is gone, contacts included. You must accept that it is all (mostly) out of your control, and it might not ever make sense. That you have emerged from Chaos, and she reserves the right to pull you back into the abyss at any time.

To read more, go here.

New essay at Medium

Over at Medium, I wrote about my ambivalent relationship with my cat Scout, and how I came to terms with it:

Life is like a box of chocolates, Forrest Gump once said. You never know what you’re gonna get. We often think we deserve accolades for mere intentions: for opening our doors to abandoned pets, for signing on to raise children for 18 (or sometimes 25 or 30) years of our lives. But what happens when something goes wrong, when we get a seemingly spoiled chocolate, or one to which we’re allergic? How we deal with unmet expectations is the mettle of who we are, not our good intentions. And we can never know who we are until we encounter a situation in which we are forced confront the existence of our lesser selves, the ones who want to throw in the towel, pout, be angry at life’s unfairness, and not follow through on our commitments.

To read more, go here.