Category: Gratitude
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Eighteen Reflections on What I’ve Learned in Eighteen Years of Sobriety
Life will go on with, or without me. Whenever tragedy strikes, my energy is better spent thinking of others. Just because it feels like the world has stopped, doesn’t mean it has. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and trauma are all diseases of perception. All three work to kill its host by convincing them they aren’t afflicted. […]
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Ice Cream Heaven
“The ice cream is always flowing, and the conversation is always interesting in my version of heaven.”
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Purple
When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with cheetahs. Unfortunately, we lived in Minnesota and didn’t have a zoo that could house such a magnificent creature due to the severity of our winters. Naturally, I harassed my father constantly to take me to a place where I could see a real, live cheetah. […]
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Dance Like Your Inner Child is Watching
“Our daughter’s class was first, and she was glowing from the moment we pulled in the parking lot. She marched her way up to the check-in desk and then sat down in the cement hallway to change into her dance shoes. When her dance troop was called, she raced into the studio, with me tailing behind struggling to carry shoes, coats, water bottle, and the weight of my own prejudice about dance.”
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Hurry Up and Wait
This morning while life was unfolding with all the chaos that two little kiddos bring, my husband was moving slower than I would have liked. My lower self had to tell him so. His response was golden; he gently asked me if I was aware that people with PTSD often think other people are lazy? […]
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Most Precious Gift
“… We often cope in the wake of our own personal traumas, remembering the wounds as we struggle to see the growth stimulated by terrible events. Resilience has no meaning without disaster.” -Riley Black (The Last Days of the Dinosaurs)
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A Pigeon Called Fate
“The worlds are not scripted for the profound love between mother and daughter. Everything can be re-written when it comes to the love string that bonds two hearts together. Not even death can glean a taste of this radiance as its very existence is the opposite of all that is death.”
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Pancake Resentment
“The kids ate them and were thankful, but I could tell by the mass amounts of syrup they used that they were not the type of pancakes they were used to. I felt a sting of rejection that bothered me more than it should have. The inkling that I had a resentment against pancakes was rising in me once again.”
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Alligators in Duluth
“The sound of a pillow falling is not something most people would pick up on while wearing earplugs, but I did thanks to my hypervigilance due to my triggered state.”
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The Great Lie
“Time has given me the perspective that people, places, ideas, things, and even food, are not in themselves inherently a threat to anything or anyone. To live as such, is to limit ourselves from the very things that make life interesting. And while I cannot speak for the masses, my internal conflicts are the root cause of my poor decisions.”
Happy Langdon 