Today marks the twenty-second anniversary of the day my radiologist called and told my parents, “We got it all.” I wasn’t home at the time, and this pre-dated cell phones, so the way my parents chose to tell me the news was by banging pots and pans as I drove up the driveway. I got […]
cancer
On Grief and Over-Identifying with Childhood Loss
The announcement came at 11:30 on Friday morning: New York schools would be closed for the year. It wasn’t a surprise, of course. I didn’t think I had a shred of expectation that we might return in June— I even signed up for an online class on Thursday afternoons for the month of May, knowing […]
Top 10 Pivotal Moments
Could you list the most pivotal moments in your life? I’d never given the idea much thought until I read a novel in which pivotal moments were a major theme. The characters, who possessed wildly different personalities, uncannily shared a few major life events that could be traced back to similar pivotal moments. These moments […]
Happy 5th Anniversary!
Today is my blog-aversary. I’ve been writing and running this blog for five years. I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to celebrate this milestone, and I decided to tell you how the blog got started, since most of you weren’t around for its inception. And none of you- not even my family- knows about […]
The Number One Reason for Keeping A Journal
When I turned fourteen, two important things happened. The first was a big life-changing event: I got cancer. The second began as a small daily habit: I started writing in a journal. These two things had an equal impact on my life. Almost two decades later, I don’t remember what prompted me to start writing for myself. It may […]
Quick Quotes Friday: Capote
“Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.” -Truman Capote I chose this quote for three reasons: one, I love the phrase dishonest heart; two, this quote is punctuated brilliantly; and three, it contains a cancer reference, my personal trigger. Let’s take each of those separately. What is a […]