I sit alone, minding my own business. My focus buried in a book. The guy clomps nearby and drops heavily into a seat across…
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Monday afternoon a few weeks ago. A little before 4 pm. I get a call informing me that I am fired. Moments such as this…
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My father has become a poet. I should have seen this coming. When he retired he learned piano, then guitar. His fascination with music evolved into a fascination…
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“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is…
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As a writer I am often confronted with contradictions. In trying to condense ideas into digestible chunks in my essays, to have focus and to make some reasonable conclusions, I have to become comfortable with the ambiguous, the uncertain and the downright confusing.
Take, for example, the differences in our individual sensibilities of what we reveal of ourselves publicly.
Some of the stuff people put up on Facebook is irritating and disingenuous. I am often amazed at the subjects they choose to share with their “friends.” To me so much of it is like announcing to someone, “Hi, nice to meet you. I am a middle-aged man with insecurities out the wazoo that I wish to unload on you in the hope that you will feel sorry for me and like me.”
My fiancé has a Facebook page but I don’t think she’s looked at in years. She is as unlikely to put anything she regarded as personal on there any more than she would go to the park across the street stark naked and drunk and announce her love for me.
She is in some ways the product of her Swedish heritage. She keeps most of what’s inside tightly held, revealing only to those to whom she is closest.
I respect and admire my fiancé for her sense of what is personal and how much and with whom she shares of herself. We are a lot alike in this way, yet I push the limits of my comfort as an important part of my writing.
My essays are deliberately personal. Being as transparent and authentic as possible–even while uncomfortable–makes possible bridging the distance and time between my writing 6and those who might read me possible. If you are going to take the time to read 500 to 1,000 words wouldn’t you want to get something out of it?
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I’ve read a lot recently about how controlling what we focus our thoughts on can have a lot to do with how happy we are.…
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