Tag: writing
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One Shot
There is an opening question in Eminem’s Lose Yourself that has been playing in my head on a loop since last night. The one about whether you would seize your one shot or let it slip. If you know the song, you know the lines. If you don’t, look them up. They are worth the…
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Happiness Was Never Meant to Be a Place You Live
I hear about happiness every day. From patients. From friends. From family. From strangers who overhear me in coffee shops and decide to tell me about their pursuit of it. It is one of the most talked-about, most searched-for, most obsessed-over concepts in modern life. And I have started to think we are talking about…
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You Want Submission? Let’s Talk About What That Actually Costs You.
There is a whole genre of social media content right now that I keep running into, and I would like to have a word about it. It is the current wave of posts — many of them explicitly aimed at women, though the argument applies to any human being — about the beauty of submission…
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The Conversation I Was Never Going to Have
Some days you wake up expecting nothing in particular. You get out of bed. You drink your tea. You do the ordinary things a person does at the start of a Tuesday. And then, at some point during the day, life reaches across the table, taps you gently on the shoulder, and hands you something…
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Notes From the Bathroom Mirror on Nuclear Strategy – of which I know nothing about.
Fair warning: what follows is a series of thoughts I had this morning while brushing my teeth. These are not the thoughts of a nuclear strategist, a policy analyst, or a person with any relevant credentials whatsoever on the topic of geopolitics. These are the thoughts of a woman getting ready for her day, whose…
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The Costume of Professionalism
I have been thinking about the word professionalism, and how much work it has been asked to do, and how much of that work I am no longer sure it should be doing (I’m a words person). Let me be clear and careful about what I am talking about from the start. There is a…
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You Are Supposed to Feel Bad Sometimes
I have spent a lot of time on social media lately, which is its own confession, and I have come to a conclusion. Most of the problems I see people creating for themselves — the messy exits, the unnecessary lies, the destroyed relationships, the endless drama, the same mistakes made over and over in slightly…
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Say What You Mean. Mean What You Say.
I want to talk about something that has been bothering me. And I want to be honest that I am a little exasperated about it, because pretending I’m not would be, ironically, exactly the kind of behavior I’m about to complain about. A lot of people do not say what they mean. A lot of…
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I Have Decided I Need a Clone
I have been giving this a lot of thought, and I have concluded that the only reasonable path forward is a clone. Possibly three. Here is where I’ve landed on the math. There are things I want to do, things I have to do, and things I need to do, and these are — I…
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I Am Not Nice
I am not nice. I have never been described as nice by anyone who has actually known me. Cool, funny, direct, intense, a lot — sure. I have heard all of these. I have heard several of them in the same sentence. But nice has never been on the list, and I have made my…