Author, Coach, Inspirational Speaker, Mapusha Supporter
Reflecting back, high school was confusing for me. And you?
While I won elections and accolades, this only propped up an image of me that felt foreign. On the outside I looked like a teenage success. I was a cheerleader, a goal-scorer on the lacrosse team, an honor-roll student.
Inside, I wasn’t sure who I was or even what to wear. I was filled with confusion. And I couldn’t seem to dispel the popular notion floating around that I knew all about sex.Continue Reading
It is inspiring to watch so many women courageously stand up and speak out about sexual abuse. I know the courage it takes. And I am fired up to help women in any way I can to stand solidly in their power.
I envision more and more women able to speak their truth and stand strong for what they believe is right.
I know that if women were more empowered, this world would look quite different.
I remember it clearly—my surprise and growing sense of horror.
Somehow my mother being unable to speak honestly to her doctor of many years awoke in me a deeper understanding of how I was raised. She wouldn’t speak that day about all the problems and discomforts with her heart, her appetite, her body.
I had accompanied my mother, who was in her 90’s, to the doctor. He had been her doctor for years, knew her well, was a caring and careful man yet that day, when he asked how she was, she smiled with awkward shyness and replied, “Just fine.”
I realized that, I, too, wasn’t raised to speak my truth. Continue Reading
One evening, when I was in my highly dramatic 20’s trying to explain my latest upset to an introverted housemate, he took me by the arm and walked me over to the window. He gestured to the sky and said simply,
“Look at the sky. Go wide.“
I use this same trick in these turbulent days when I read the paper or listen to NPR and find myself tightening, pulling in and putting up walls.
“Go wide,” I tell myself. “Go wide.”
It isn’t always the sky, though that often works on these sunny, summer-Portland days. Sometimes it is reaching for a sense of the larger arc of time, the big picture, the continual ebb and flow of life.
Or I think of the next generation. And the next. Attending my beloved niece’s, beyond-wonderful wedding, I got to experience a passel of bright and vivacious 30-somethings. They made me smile for our future.
I smile, soften and go wide as I watch my nephew teaching his three-year-old daugter to be kind to her young sister, to marvel at the blueberries, to rescue a dying caterpillar from the porch. Continue Reading
