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“You’d Make a Good Bishop’s Wife”: When a Compliment Starts Sounding Like an Insult in Hindsight
A bishop’s wife (a bishop is always married, and to a woman) is held to a certain standard by association. Her role is to support her husband not just with her willingness to come second after the congregation, but by demonstrating to the other women in their ward what it means to be an exemplary “helpmeet.”
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On Weirdness and Play: Or an Ode to the Creative Haven That Was My Uncle’s House
I stared up at my second grade teacher with a probably drifting eye, probably long tangled brown hair, maybe even wearing the XXL shirt with the giant printed cow on the front I loved so much around this time. And the way she responded to me has never left my brain in thirty years.
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[My Upanishad] Something I Wrote in a Class I Almost Didn’t Take Because It Was Called Lit of the Sacred
Years ago I signed up for a class at Utah Valley University called “Literature of the Sacred,” specifically because my first instinct was to dismiss it. I reconsidered. This wasn’t BYU, after all, and the course description didn’t read like Seminary or Institute (the school-adjacent religious courses I attended as a high school student and during my first semester as an undergrad back in the early 00s). Maybe this class would help cleanse the bitterness mormonism had left on my tongue for words like “sacred,” “faith,” and “prayer.” Maybe it would be a good companion course to the work I was doing in therapy. I thought of all my classes…
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“Atomic Habits” by James Clear and the Self-Care Ritual of Routine: Or How I Plan to Process 2020
I find a lot of comfort in routine, controlling the things I can control when so much of the outside world feels and is so broken. My emotional stamina is currently finite and fleeting, so I have to spend it wisely or risk losing, hours, days, whatever to debilitating anxiety, which brings me to the point of this post: self-care.
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To the Woman Who Kicked My Dog: How Did Your Easter Fast Go?
I accidentally broke a glass before filling it with a cold water infusion of violet and yarrow, and didn’t realize it until I was already drinking from it in the dark, invoking the cosmos for respite from conflict, illness, from cruel people, from fear and the chemistry of my brain, from the pitfalls of my past and the inevitability of future mistake.
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Prone to Swoons: How Not to Write Cliche When You Are One
I blue-screened in front of the mirror, addled by a full day of beer and wine and a prolonged period of undereating. My body just didn’t have enough of what it needed to keep me conscious right then, overwhelmed as it had been many times before: after my wisdom tooth surgery, four-wheeling accident, childhood fever. I swooned, as I have discovered myself prone to do.
