Growing Up in a World That Never Logs Off Adolescents have always spent a huge chunk of their time trying to figure out where they fit in. High school years bring a constant stream of heavy questions about who you are, who your real friends are, and how to get people to accept you. For most young people, fitting in feels every bit as important as working out their own identity. Wanting people to like you, include you, and get where you are coming from is just part of growing up. Right ...read more

When Life Reminds Us We Are Not in Control If life has taught me anything, it is that you can plan until you are blue in the face, and the world will still wreck your plans without a second thought. You make lists, set goals, build routines, and convince yourself that you finally have the steering wheel locked down. Then something hits you sideways and rips that illusion right out of your hands. A relationship shatters. Someone you love gets a terminal diagnosis. You lose your income, ...read more

The Importance of Staying Connected to Play Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, many of us get handed an invisible rulebook that basically says, “Welcome to adulting. Now stop having fun!” And just like that, everything has to be serious. We have bills, careers, families, responsibilities, appointments, errands, deadlines, and approximately 9,847 things on our mental to-do lists at any given moment. We learn that being responsible means being productive, and somewhere along the way, ...read more

Suicide Awareness Month comes and goes, but the heavy reality never shifts for the people living through it. September brings a brief surge of infographics, hotlines, and public posts, but when you are carrying the weight of a sudden loss, grief does not follow a monthly calendar. The memorial service, funeral, or celebration of life ends, the phone stops ringing, and the rest of the world moves on. Yet those left behind are sitting in the silence, staring at the empty space, trapped in a ...read more

There is something happening in the way young people talk about mental health that deserves a serious conversation. Mental health awareness has opened doors that desperately needed to be opened. Young people have more language for their emotions, more access to information, and more opportunities to talk about experiences that previous generations were often expected to hide. That part is a good thing. The problem begins when mental illness stops being understood as something painful, ...read more

Understanding Attachment Without Turning Yourself Into a Diagnosis If you have ever stared at your phone because someone has not texted you back and, within about seven minutes, your brain has gone from "They are probably busy" to "They are mad at me" to "They are definitely leaving me," you have experienced how quickly relationships can activate our nervous systems. On the other hand, maybe you are the person who sees three unanswered texts and thinks, "Great. I have time to myself," only ...read more

Social media has gotten so wrapped up in everyday life that it is hard to remember what things felt like back when we could not instantly peek at what everyone else was doing, thinking, celebrating, arguing about, or eating for dinner. Decades ago, keeping up with friends meant making a phone call, dropping by their house, or sending a handwritten letter. Now, a quick scroll before you even finish your morning coffee drops you right into the middle of hundreds of lives. Our phones have turned ...read more

In my previous piece, I explored the catharsis of listening to music and the comfort of finding a song that seems to know something about you before you have found the words yourself. Music can meet us in grief, joy, loneliness, nostalgia, anger, or longing and somehow make those feelings easier to carry. Sometimes another person's voice helps us understand our own. For me, however, there has always been another side to that relationship with music. I do not only want to listen to it. I ...read more

Some songs hit you right in the gut before you even realize what is happening. A sudden drop in a melody or a crack in a singer's voice can pull up old grief, the feeling of missing someone, or a specific kind of nostalgia that has been sitting under the surface for years. People do not usually throw on a specific record just to fill empty noise. We use sound to ground our chaotic inner lives. We crank up a heavy bassline to give our anger somewhere to go or put on a quiet acoustic track to ...read more

The Pressure to Be Everything for Everyone There is a quiet, heavy expectation placed on women that we should carry everything on our shoulders without ever letting the strain show. We are expected to nurture, support, succeed, remain emotionally available, keep everything organized, and somehow maintain a sense of calm through the entire storm. While these pressures land on women in every season of life, motherhood amplifies them in a way that feels nearly impossible to describe. Becoming a ...read more