There’s something about my hair that has always felt so central, so fundamental, to who I am. It can make me feel confident and powerful on good days, frumpy and sick on bad days. It can make me go to the gym just before it needs a wash, and avoid walking outside just after a blow dry.
Goodbye, Beautiful Soul.
When I was ten years old, my mom wanted to go back to work full time. That meant my brother, Yogi, and I would be home alone for a couple hours a day just after school until 5pm when Mom could get home to us. Yogi is five years older than me, which, at the…
How I Went from Blog to Book Deal
I tend to write about my failures because they make me feel human and flawed, and I think we can all connect to that raw and painful feeling of having missed our ideal target at some point in our lives. But once in a while things go the other direction for me and I feel…
Recovering from Addiction
It’s 3am. I’m still up. I’ve been staring directly into the bright rectangular light coming from my phone as I lay on my right shoulder, holding the phone at just the right angle so that the screen doesn’t flip to landscape mode. My thumb joint hurts from the constant flicking, up down, left right. I…
My Battle With Depression
“He keeps asking me what’s wrong. I wish I knew, but I don’t. I don’t know. So I make something up to keep the monsters at bay. I feel so unhappy. I feel empty inside. I feel lifeless. I fear what the future holds for me. I fear the dismay with who I have become….
Life After Death
The first day after was the hardest. The questions kept lurching towards me like a swinging punching bag filled with sand. I bobbed and weaved as quickly as possible. I threw my left jab out to keep us apart. I answered the hard swings with a right cross, putting my weight behind it, swiveling my hips, keeping my head low and protected from the next one.
Confessions of a Failed Entrepreneur
I’m laid flat on my back on the fake wood floor in the middle of our office staring up at the disgusting ceiling fan that hasn’t been cleaned in over a year, watching a large clump of dust spin around and around, gathering momentum, teetering further to the edge by the second. I have a deep sense that when it falls, it will fall directly on my face, because that’s just my luck these days, and I wont be able to do a thing about it: I literally cannot move.
How to Make Lemonade
This unique triumph over my fear of failure happened on accident. I did not intend to hurt myself or to instill fear in my parents’ hearts. Life hands us lemons when we least expect them and when we would really prefer not to have them at all.
The End of a Love Affair
We first met when we were just kids. She was a little older than me; I was nervous she could see right through me. I had a hard exterior back then, a sense of entitlement with a touch of masked anger. I built a high wall with a mote around my heart, and she knew it right away.
Fear
“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.” -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971