Tag: resilience

  • Commencement Season: Tassels, Tears, and One Last Trip to the Snack Bar

    There’s something strange about graduation season. For four years, students spend most of high school counting down to the end of school—talking about summer, freedom, and escaping homework forever. Then suddenly, during the final few weeks, everyone starts walking around campus like they’re in the last ten minutes of a movie. People who normally sprint…

  • The Discipline of Presence

    I said this to a group of colleagues the other day. We were talking about the apparent apathy we see in students—and in many adults. “Failing to show up is giving the world your consent to move on without you.” Their response was thoughtful. They said the line had weight—but maybe it was too harsh.…

  • Life Is A Notebook

    I came across this idea the other day, and it stayed with me longer than I expected— the kind of thought that doesn’t just pass through, but settles in. Maybe it’s the way we hold onto moments—like scraps of paper, like old notebooks tucked away in drawers. Every now and then, something reminds you that…

  • Throwing Words Into the Wind

    Let me tell you a story…something I learned about myself, and only fully recently acknowledged. This won’t be a confession of weakness, nor a tale of courage or inner strength. Those are just labels. And the truth is, labels are strangers to far more people like me than most realize. If anything, this story is…

  • The Longest Day – Sanitized, Signed In, and Socially Distanced

    I’ve had long days before. I mean, who hasn’t. Everyone has a horror story or two about work, some more drink worthy than others. A friend and I were recently comparing notes over coffee, as one does when caffeine doubles as a therapist. The conversation inevitably twisted itself around the question: who had the longest…

  • Out of the Dark to Find Me Again

    So last night, I had a realization. Not one of those cinematic, lightning-strikes-the-soul kind of realizations. No dramatic music, no sudden gasp into the void. More like… sitting there, minding my business, and boom—my brain quietly taps me on the shoulder like, “Hey… you good?” And apparently, I wasn’t. Or at least, my writing wasn’t.…

  • Dichoso El Árbol

    Music. For most, it is simply entertainment. For some, it fills the silence. For others, it is just noise, or a distraction from what weighs on the mind. But for a smaller number, music is more—it is healing, it is connection, even a kind of spiritual touch. For me, it is a bit of all…

  • Like Therapy – No Appointment Required

    Life is a journey—and what a messy, beautiful one it is. There are peaks that make you feel invincible, and valleys that make you question if you packed the right shoes.  Triumphs feel like fireworks; failures feel like stepping on Legos in the dark. Each stumble, each victory, leaves a little mark, whether we notice…

  • Still, I Walk 

    There are many who move through the world carrying more than they reveal. You pass them every day—at stoplights, in hallways, in quiet moments of laughter that arrive right on time.  They are not broken. They are not asking to be saved. They have simply learned how to live with weight and still walk upright.…

  • The Noise of Learning

    I used to think learning was supposed to be quiet.Neat. Orderly. Predictable. But in my world, it never sounded that way. It sounded like pencil scratches in the margins of a notebook, screws rattling on a garage floor, the click of a camera shutter, the uneven notes of a song I hadn’t yet learned how…

  • Several Hundred Words Later

    We’ve all been there. Not as heroes, not as villains—just as silent witnesses to someone else’s emotional eruption. That strange moment when you realize you’re no longer part of a conversation, but the audience to a performance you never bought tickets for. You don’t interrupt.You don’t argue. You simply stand there, nodding politely, mentally taking…

  • Alone, But With Company

    You can be in a room full of people and feel like the only inhabitant of a private planet. Not lonely—oh no, that would require longing—but singular, spectacularly self-contained. Sometimes I wonder: is my body here, and my mind elsewhere? Or my mind here, and my body wandering off somewhere? I can’t remember; I always…

  • Me, My Thoughts, and That Morning Cup of Joe

    As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the morning quite a whole lot more. Not the dramatic, cinematic kind—the kind you see in a travel magazine with the sunlight spilling over mountains—but the ordinary, quiet of a house that hasn’t fully woken up yet. The kind of quiet where the world hasn’t started asking…

  • Being me…

    The hardest thing about being me is forgetting how hard it is to be me. I wake, I move, I mend the cracks and call it progress. I joke, I help, I give what’s left and call it love. Some days I remember the weight of it all— and some days I wear it so…

  • Showing Up Matters: Even on Empty

    Showing Up Matters: Even on Empty

    For many, the day begins with a routine — a shower, a coffee, a to-do list. But for others, the day starts already behind. The alarm clock doesn’t mark a fresh start; it signals a race to catch up. Whether due to overwork, family obligations, economic hardship, health struggles, or emotional stress, some people begin…