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Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Buying Happiness

Posted in Arts, Life, Society, tagged , , , , , on April 7, 2011| 12 Comments »

Photo by Werner Kunz

I attended a birthday party a couple of weeks ago, and I had a conversation that’s become stuck in my mind. I was talking to a friend who was foregoing travel for a period of time (maybe a couple of years) in order to save up for a car he really wants. He said something like, “I always prefer spending money on things instead of experiences because I can keep on having great experiences with material objects for a long period of time.”

This statement caused me to begin questioning the culture of consumerism and my own relationship with the materialistic world. If questioned, I would have answered the exact opposite of my friend, that I prefer to spend money on experiences because those experiences will make me happier and more engaged in my life as a whole. There’s even research supporting my viewpoint.

But it’s not that simple, is it? I like material things as well as anyone else. My husband and I own a house, and we just purchased a new car since my old one (a ‘95 Corolla) has become finicky in its old age. Plus I have my three consumer weaknesses: books, sheet music, and clothes & jewelry. Hence the main storage problems in my house are bookshelf space and closet space.

I remember when I was starting my studio business, and I had to strictly prioritize my budget to make my earnings stretch. I allowed myself to buy sheet music (within reason) because I used it in my business. I only bought books on special occasions (thank goodness for libraries), and pretty much only mass market paperbacks even then. I did go clothes shopping, but I was careful to visit stores like Mervyn’s, Target, and Ross, where my money would go a lot farther.

In return for this thrift, I allowed myself experiences that I desperately wanted. I always allowed myself gas money if I wanted to drive somewhere to visit friends or enjoy a particular sight. I’d occasionally splurge on a dinner out with friends. And I’d save everything else for my annual trip abroad—the experience of travel and seeing other cultures was my highest priority. Sometimes I wished I could buy “pretty” things, but more often I worried about unexpected medical expenses taking away my travel budget. Experience trumped all.

One year, however, after I had received some gift money, I splurged and bought the complete set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. I was so excited about this purchase, and I don’t even know how many times I’ve watched those DVDs—over and over, and I’m sure I’ll be watching them many more times in the future. So I understand what my friend meant about material objects giving lasting pleasure. What about a good piano? Does that count as a material object or do we purchase what a piano represents: the experience of making music? And driving in an expensive car (like my friend wants) is a completely different experience than driving my rattling old Corolla.

I wonder how often when we’re spending money on something material, what we’re really buying is the experience the object represents. I think I’d personally still prioritize straight-up experience expenses over more object-oriented ones: a night at the theater, a delicious meal, being able to spend time with non-local friends, traveling around the world. But perhaps my friend and I aren’t so different in our thought processes after all.

In which case, here’s the lesson I’m taking away from this: if I am making a purchase, I will try to remember to stop and consider what experience a given object represents, and then decide whether it is an experience that I truly want and that the object will actually deliver.

Objects are never going to be what makes me the happiest, however. My husband, my dog, my friends, intellectual stimulation and challenge, music and stories—these are the most important to me.

Which do you prefer—spending money on experiences or physical objects? Care to share a particularly memorable experience or purchase? I’m all ears.

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Guest Post on Writer’s Block

Posted in Life, Writing, tagged , , , on April 6, 2011| 4 Comments »

I have a guest post over at Cole Drewes’s blog today. It is entitled Writer’s Block: Amusing Myth or Grim Reality. Go ahead and check it out, and let me know if you believe in writer’s block or not.

Also, here is a picture of a cute little dog. Just because.

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Desperation is not your Friend

Posted in Arts, Life, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 29, 2011| 8 Comments »

Last week we talked about thinking of writing as a business, which includes educating ourselves about the industry and making informed choices. Today I want to talk about something that keeps us from making clear-headed business decisions. 

Desperation.

Desperation rears its ugly head for most writers, often (although not exclusively) toward the beginning of a career. We want so badly to be published, to be chosen, to have public validation that we aren’t wasting our time. We want to get our words and stories to the public. We want to be able to tell our friends and acquaintances, “Why, yes, I have an agent now. And Big Publisher XYZ wants to buy my novel.” Or “Why, yes, my indie-published novel is on the Kindle Best-seller List now, thanks for asking.” We want to know that we’re moving forward with our craft and not staying stuck in a hellish holding pattern. We want we want we want.

Some amount of ambition and desire for success is healthy. It might keep us on a daily writing schedule or encourage us to continue sending out those queries. It might motivate us to improve our craft or take a workshop. But it’s so easy to cross from these helpful impulses into the dark side of desperation.

The danger of entering that desperate place is that our decision-making process becomes impaired. Instead of making practical, well-reasoned decisions, we’re suddenly willing to do almost anything to see our work in print. We’ll sign with an agent even though we either haven’t done thorough research on the agent’s history or have a bad feeling about the working relationship. We’ll sign a publishing contract even though it offers poor terms. We’ll rush into self-publishing our novel electronically without enlisting first readers and/or editors to help us make the book the best it can be. We’ll say something best left unsaid on the social media of our choice because we’re so stressed/insecure/jealous/upset that we just can’t help ourselves.

Acting from a place of desperation is the opposite of acting from empowerment. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with a traditional publishing structure or taking the indie path. In either case, desperation will lead to poor decisions (unless you’re very, very lucky). Desperation will tempt you to devalue yourself and your work and believe me, you don’t want to go down that path.

So what is a poor writer to do? Stop. Breathe. Try to convince yourself that you’re not in a race and you don’t have to hurry to the detriment of everything else. Avoid comparing yourself to other writers who are doing everything better, faster, with more shiny. Avoid it like the plague. Postpone any big decisions until you can talk yourself into a calmer state of mind.

And remember you’re not alone. I think writer desperation is very common, but we don’t always talk about it. I am writing this to tell you that I have felt it, I have been there, and I might very well be there again. All of the doubt and the waiting and the anxiety and the rejection and the lack of understanding–it SUCKS. Of course we sometimes feel desperate. But we don’t have to give the desperation the power to take over our lives. We can feel it and then keep going, keep trying, keep believing in ourselves. And we can do our best to make our business decisions based on the facts and our priorities instead of on a crazy-making emotional state.

Does anyone else ever experience writer desperation? Have any good tips on how to avoid it or deal with it once it’s happening? Please share!

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How Writing Has Changed My Brain

Posted in Life, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on March 24, 2011| 16 Comments »

On Tuesday night my husband and I went on a date night to see The Adjustment Bureau. During the car ride home, I proceeded to tear the movie apart: partly its plot (especially the end, ouch) and partly its portrayal of women. My direct quote: “Was this movie written by people who hate women?” Yeah, not pretty. (Also, just for the record, this movie is urban fantasy, not science fiction.)

Well, at least the poster is pretty.

While I could easily spend an entire blog post critiquing this movie (and wouldn’t my snark be amusing?), I’m going to restrain myself and instead point out something else. If I had watched this movie three years ago, I would have thought it was mildly entertaining and left it at that (except the end. I still would have thought the end was stupid.) I wouldn’t have noticed the negative depiction of women, and I definitely wouldn’t have noticed the issues I had with the plot.

Becoming a writer has changed me in many ways, not the least of which is the way that I engage with entertainment. I read differently, and I watch TV series and movies differently. If I still played video games, I’d probably experience them differently too. Even when I force my mind out of critique mode (which I can usually do if the errors in front of me aren’t super egregious), I notice aspects of the narrative that I never saw before. I think about conflict, I think about stakes, and I think about character motivations. And I notice when women are being portrayed as playing pieces instead of fully realized characters.

When I’m not enjoying a novel, instead of just putting it aside, I start to analyze why it isn’t working for me. Are there too many info dumps, or is the beginning too slow? Do I not understand or buy into the world building ? Does a character’s voice not ring true? Or is it merely a personal preference issue? (I tend to bounce off fairly dense prose with large amounts of description. Sometimes I can objectively see that this is good, but it doesn’t matter. I’m still bored out of my mind.)

When I am enjoying a novel, I try to pay attention to why I’m loving it so much. What combination of techniques is the author using to give me such a reader happy? How is that Guy Gavriel Kay switches POVs and tenses as much as he does without making me hate the book? How is it that Suzanne Collins keeps the pace so breathless in The Hunger Games?

I don’t usually mind this interference. It sounds awful, and if I had known about it ahead of time, it might have given me pause. But in reality, it’s kind of like a nerdy, intellectual game. It’s fun to be able to have solid reasons to put behind my opinions. It’s even entertaining to have debates on the relative merits and drawbacks of a certain work.

But perhaps most importantly, I haven’t merely learned how to read or view media differently. Becoming a writer has changed how I see and understand the world and its history, present, and future. It has changed how I see the people in that world. And I wouldn’t give that up for anything.

If you’re a writer, how has it changed how you read or experience the world? If you’re not a writer, have you encountered something else that has had a similar effect on you?

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Embrace the Suck

Posted in Arts, Life, tagged , , , , , , , on March 17, 2011| 8 Comments »

When I decided a few years ago that I was going to get serious about my writing, I knew I was going to be writing novels. Novels were, after all, the bulk of what I read. I sat down and wrote a novel to prove to myself that I was capable of doing it.

That’s when I actually became serious about writing. I knew I had the discipline, I knew writing was something I enjoyed and found satisfying. And I fell in with a genre critique group and said to myself, “Oh, I’m supposed to be writing short stories too. Sure, I’ll give it a try. After the novel, how hard could it be?”

Cue the laugh track. Yes, I was being stupid, but I figured out my own stupidity soon enough. I wrote a short story, and it was very hard. So much worldbuilding for so small a project! It drove me nuts. And then I had to rewrite the story, and rewrite the story, and it didn’t matter how much I rewrote this stupid story, because it was never going to work.

Over the course of the next year, I wrote more stories (although perhaps not as many as I should have). At some point I got the bright idea that I should also be reading short stories. (I know. Genius at work here.) That entire year, I hated writing short stories. I actively disliked it. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it (probably stubbornness). I told myself that short stories didn’t matter anyway, because obviously I was meant to write novels.

Then I finally worked on a story that I enjoyed writing (probably not coincidentally, the one I just sold). I thought to myself, “Maybe short stories aren’t so bad. I mean, they’re annoying, but they have their good points.” I wrote more short stories.

Yesterday I found myself thinking, “You know, even if I got a book deal right now,” — for the record, this is impossible as I have nothing out on submission, but a girl likes to dream — “I’d still want to keep writing short stories.” I stopped and realized what I had just said, and shook my head at myself.

Why am I telling you this rather long story? Because so often we pigeonhole ourselves. Sometimes this can be useful to keep focus and make sure we’re prioritizing our goals, but sometimes we accidentally limit ourselves instead.

It’s especially easy to limit ourselves when we start something new and, surprise surprise, we’re not very good at it. It’s so easy to say, “I don’t like this anyway” or “This is too hard” or “I’m going to do shiny thing z instead.” I’ve seen this over and over as a music teacher. A lot of students thought they wanted to learn how to sing, but once they realized that singing is difficult, that it requires hard work and practice and dedication and failure, many of them would drop out. (Especially adults. It always seemed especially surprising to the adults.) A lot of my children students didn’t enjoy practicing the piano because it was hard and they weren’t very good. If they stuck with it for awhile, though, and were able to pass a certain threshold of competence, all of a sudden playing the piano became much more pleasurable.

I think a lot of pursuits are like this. When we’re starting out and don’t have many skills, it kind of sucks. But then as we start to improve, it gets more and more interesting and exciting. Remembering this helps us keep trying when we’re still in the stage of unpleasantness.

Has anyone else had an experience like mine? Care to share?

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Inaccurate Information, or Knowing When to Listen

Posted in Life, Society, tagged , , , , , , on March 15, 2011| 9 Comments »

I still remember the first time I realized that people who sound perfectly confident about what they’re saying are not always correct. It was sometime in my mid-20s (apparently I was a slow learner?) when I was in conversation with a friend of mine, and he said something about Yosemite National Park that I knew was incorrect. Mind you, it wasn’t something I thought I might have gotten wrong or was otherwise unsure about. I’d been going to Yosemite every year since I was born, so I was ninety-nine percent certain that my friend was stating something factually inaccurate.

However, when I offered my expertise on the subject, he didn’t admit to not being sure himself. To every outward appearance he was just as confident about his correctness as he had ever been. And at that moment I had an epiphany: People could be telling me inaccurate information all the time, and unless it was a subject in which I had personal expertise, I would never know the difference.

Dinosaurs and humans coexisted … um, right? No, but 41% of American adults think they did.

We hear a lot about how information on the internet may or may not be very reliable, but the internet is merely boosting the signal of an older problem. How do we know, not when people are maliciously lying to us (that’s another problem, but thankfully a much rarer one for me personally), but when they are misrepresenting their knowledge? And worse still, how can we avoid passing this ignorant knowledge onwards ourselves? (Incidentally, Wikipedia has an entire list of common misconceptions. Of course, you have to ask yourself: how much of this list is accurate? And the nature of the beast is revealed in all of its pernicious twistings.)

Another aspect of the problem is oversimplification. It seems to me that while my life can be very complicated, that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of complications in the greater world. And yet it’s so easy to think about an issue or subject for only a minute or two and pronounce upon it, failing to delve into the deeper implications, the bigger picture, the history, or what-have-you.

I’ll give an example that I see a fair amount. I happen to know something about the geopolitics of the Middle East. Do I have a complete understanding? No. Am I an expert? No again. Why not? Because the situation is complicated, and because it’s difficult to find reliable sources of information, and because I live far away and therefore can’t rely on firsthand experience. Also because I come from a different country and bring my own cultural expectations into my reasoning, and in spite of my best efforts, I’m sure some of that leaks through to color my opinions and observations.

However, I do know enough to be able to tell when others know what they’re talking about (and when they don’t). I also know enough to notice when people seem to have formed opinions about situations in the Middle East even though they lack the background information necessary to develop a deep understanding. I don’t mind so much when I speak to people who have different opinions from me on this topic (on the contrary, it’s such a complicated topic that I welcome the chance to learn more, especially from those who are more personally involved and/or affected).  However, when it becomes obvious that they’re not likewise trying to educate themselves even when they lack information (which is easy to lack when you live half-way around the world), well, then once again ignorance has won. And it will spread.

I’m worried because this isn’t an inspirational post, and I like the inspirational posts the best. But for a problem like this, I don’t have any real answers. I try to do my best to be accurate in the information I pass along, but sometimes I make honest mistakes. I try to educate myself about the issues I care about, and I try not to profess knowledge I don’t have and instead ask questions to improve my understanding. (Six years ago, I knew nothing at all about the Middle East, for example.) When I hear information I know to be incorrect, I try to speak up, even though I often don’t feel like being assertive.

But in an information-heavy world, there will always be information that is inaccurate or incomplete. And there will always be people who aren’t interested in listening.

What do you think about this problem? How do you deal with it in your daily life?

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My First Sale, and Sit at the Table

Posted in Life, Society, Writing, tagged , , , , , , on March 10, 2011| 18 Comments »

Last week I got some exciting news.

I’d been on an airplane for several hours, flying home from a very successful vacation. I was slightly brain-dead, and I’m sure my in-flight dinner of Pringles and peanut butter cups hadn’t helped matters. After having survived the little dog frenzy of homecoming, I settled by the fire to check my e-mail, happily procrastinating from unpacking my suitcase.

I clicked on one of my e-mails, read the first sentence, and screamed. Literally. I think my husband thought I’d seriously hurt myself, because he came running from the other room.

What did that e-mail say? It told me that I sold my first story! Daily Science Fiction wants to publish my story “Forever Sixteen”. Hooray!

(And no, I don’t know when it will come out, but I’m guessing it will be awhile. Stay tuned….)

I was feeling pretty good about myself, in an I’ve-spent-all-day-on-a-plane sort of way. And I felt even better when, the very next day, I found out that I’d received an Honorable Mention in the most recent quarter of the Writers of the Future contest.

(Taking my moment to bask, giggle, jump around the room, and basically celebrate!)

******
Okay, I’m back.

Now I’m going to share a bit of unproductive thinking that went along with this good news. When I found out about the sale, I was happily sharing my news on Twitter and Facebook, celebrating with the great people who have been supporting me. But, when I found out about the Honorable Mention the next day, after the requisite excitement, I turned to my husband and said, “I don’t know if I should tell anyone about this.” He asked me why not, and I continued, “Well, it’s just too soon after yesterday’s good news. Plus won’t it seem like I’m bragging if I say anything?” Then I paused, thought about what I’d just said, and cried, “Oh no! I just did that thing!”

Do you see that thing I did? I automatically wanted to downplay my success instead of sharing it. I worried about “bragging”, even though I would never think that of another writer posting the same news. Is this because I’m a woman who has been trained to be a team player and never toot my own horn? Is this because I’m a writer with the prerequisite insecurities so often found in my profession? Even after noticing my strange behavior, I still rationalized with a “Maybe I should say something on Twitter but not Facebook.” Because somehow that would make a difference? Hello, irrationality!

I’d love to say that this was an isolated case, but the truth is I see it all the time. Just this past weekend I was spending time with two lovely women writer friends of mine. Both of them have blogs. Both of them are active on Twitter and Facebook. But neither of them regularly post notifications of their new blog posts on Twitter or Facebook. This drives me crazy because I forget to read their blogs as a direct result.

I talked to one of them about it, and she said, “Oh, I don’t know if people would really be interested.” And that’s the clincher, right? I think most of us have moments of thinking the same sort of thoughts. Why would anyone care about what we have to say? Maybe it’s not a good idea after all to put ourselves out there.

Newsflash! People are following you because they’re interested in what you’re doing, and they’re interested in what you have to say. So if you don’t let them know about your newest blog post, you are shooting yourself in the foot. After all, they don’t have to click on the link you provide if they don’t feel like it. You’re not forcing them into anything. You’re just letting them know what’s available.

This ties directly into Sheryl Sandberg’s advice to women on the video I linked to earlier this week. Her first point? Sit at the table. What did she mean? That if we sideline ourselves, letting other people sit at the table while we hang off at the edges being self-effacing and shy, we aren’t giving ourselves the same chance at success. We aren’t giving ourselves the same respect that we give others. And if we don’t give ourselves that respect, then why will anyone else?

Sit at the table. I dare you.

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You are not Me

Posted in Life, Society, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on February 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

– People should travel around the world to learn more about both themselves and other cultures.
– People shouldn’t waste their time and money traveling abroad when you can learn everything that’s really important about life in your own backyard. 

– People shouldn’t write more than one book a year because the quality of their writing will suffer if they try to do more.
– People who don’t write at least two books a year don’t have a strong work ethic.

– People shouldn’t have children because studies prove that parents are less happier than people without children.
– Everybody should have children because passing on your genes and knowledge to the next generation is the most important and fulfilling work there is.

– All authors should aspire to be offered a traditional publishing contract because that is the only established way of both distributing your work and filtering for quality.
– All authors should consider going indie because not only is the market tightening, but the contract terms from big publishers are becoming less and less favorable to new (and some mid-list) writers.

– Moms shouldn’t work because you don’t want strangers raising your children.
– Moms shouldn’t stay at home because women shouldn’t give up rewarding careers and fail to reach their full potential.

Remember that just because something is true for you does not mean it’s equally true for someone else. We all live in this world together, but we’re all individuals, each with our own point of view.

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Loneliness and Social Media

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 15, 2011| 18 Comments »

“Loneliness is the endemic disease of our time.”

My husband broke out this sentence last weekend, and of course, my response was, “Where’s my laptop? I need to write that down.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence: at its most basic, the state of being lonely and all it entails, the idea of loneliness as a disease (and a widespread systemic one at that), and whether loneliness is more prevalent now than it has been in the past.

And once I add in the context of the conversation, which was about social media, there’s even more to think about. How does social media (Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, forums, online dating, etc.) affect loneliness? Does it make us feel more connected and satisfied on the whole, or does it, by diluting our pool of friends and sometimes encouraging quantity over quality and surface over depth, make us feel even more lonely?

I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. Even if I examine my own personal experience, I’ve had both positive and negative reactions to social media.

The Bad:

1. Hearing about a party that all your friends went to, to which you were not invited, is not so fun. On the plus side, this means that when the party comes up later in in-person conversation (which it inevitably will), at least you’re not blindsided and can respond with the appropriate blasé remark.
2. Reading the never-ending stream of advice and opinions about writing and the publishing industry can be draining and kill my own inspiration and ability to work. I imagine this is true in other fields as well.
3. Time sink. Enough said.
4. Having a lot of Facebook friends is not the same as having friends who form my support network, with whom I have a private and personal relationship. And yet, sometimes Facebook distracts from the need to maintain those deeper relationships.
5. Friends’ internet time is not equal, so I will end up with more interaction with those friends who check their social networks frequently, as opposed to those friends with whom I have the closest in-person connections.
6. Social media makes me feel like I know what’s going on for people, and it makes people feel like they know what’s going on for me. Which is great, until I start to think about all the things I never say because they are too private for public consumption.

The Good:

1. One of the reasons I love blogging so much is because it allows me to use social media in a very content-heavy way, helping me balance the whole breadth vs. depth issue. Plus it gives me the chance to be a conversation-starter or to respond in depth to interesting conversations begun by others.
2. I am able to keep myself very informed and up-to-date on any of my interests or career concerns.
3. Social media makes it easier to reach out and create or find a community of like-minded individuals.
4. I can stay in at least nominal touch with a lot more people than I could have even ten years ago. Contacting someone out of the blue is also a lot less weird than it used to be.
5. Getting multiple birthday wishes (and having an easier time remembering and acknowledging others’ birthdays) makes me happy. Yes, I love birthdays.
6. Sometimes social media is great entertainment, pure and simple. And I love the way it lets people share content.

On the whole, social media makes me feel more connected, as long as I remember that it’s not a substitute for in-person time (or e-mail for those of my friends who aren’t local). What has your experience been with different forms of social media? Does it make you feel more or less isolated?

On Thursday, I’ll be exploring the idea of how loneliness fits into modern American society, and why it might be on the rise.

UPDATE: An interesting recent article on how Facebook helps people overcome shyness. It ends with the insight that some users become more lonely because of Facebook.

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Being a Free Spirit: the Dark Side

Posted in Life, Society, tagged , , , , , , , on February 10, 2011| 25 Comments »

I have a love-hate relationship with being a free spirit. I wouldn’t change who I am for the world, but it comes with its fair share of heart ache and difficulty.

Sometimes I want to be a sheep, happily grazing in a flock of other sheep and doing exactly what everyone else does. I don’t want to wander off on my own, I don’t want to forge my own path. I don’t want to collect data until I reach the inescapable conclusion that the traditional way isn’t my way. I want life to be easy, all in a straight line, with my only task being to connect the dots. I want to follow the rules, I want to pay my dues, I want to embrace a guaranteed path to success.

Of course, there are no sure paths. If there’s one thing life has taught me, it’s that you can never predict how it’s going to turn out or what opportunities may rise unexpectedly. It’s good to ask questions and reach your own conclusions, because what if circumstances have changed and conventional wisdom is just flat-out wrong? It’s good to take stock and figure out what will make you the happiest, even if the answer is unique and makes your friends and acquaintances shake their heads.

The sad truth is, sometimes people are judgmental. We emphasize the need to fit in during high school in YA novels and movies, and act like this social need doesn’t continue past a certain age. But does it disappear on our eighteenth birthdays? No. Life is not so simple and clear-cut as all that.

The result is, if we decide to be a free spirit, if we make nonconformist decisions or hold nontraditional ideas, we’re going to catch a certain amount of heat, whatever our age. Not only that, but we’ll be making our own road maps as we go, which can be a solitary and scary endeavor. Sometimes we’ll fail spectacularly, and our failures will be all the more visible because we were trying something unusual — something people didn’t think we should be trying, or something people assumed we couldn’t make work. Even when we do succeed, people will try to belittle what we have accomplished.

The conventional advice on this subject is that we shouldn’t care what people think, but sometimes we are going to care, no matter how hard we try to deny it. Therein lies the dark side to living a life outside the normal boundaries. It takes courage and self-respect, and sometimes it will sting in spite of ourselves. Sometimes we may weaken a little bit and wish we could be like everybody else, happily following the Pied Piper and playing it safe.

But we are not like everybody else. We cannot convince ourselves to be. It’s so much more exciting and fulfilling to question, to think, to decide what we honestly want and plot our own route to achieve it. It’s exhilarating to take risks and feel the buzzing, growing vitality of being alive and creating our own life stories. When I falter, I remind myself of how happy I am to have the power of choice, to be able to do what I love so much of the time, and to belong to a network of people who trust me to be me, no matter what choices (or even mistakes) I’m making.

What do you do when you falter? How do you stay strong in the face of judgement?

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