2. Please put white children on the flyer, the donor is traditional.
I’m complicit in racism in the nonprofit and social impact sectors. Here’s where I could go into defending that complicity, I was young. I didn’t know. I was on my own journey. Blah blah blah. We’ve heard it all from all the white-do-gooders like me in the world.
I’ve been in the nonprofit and mission-minded space for the entirety of my career. I started as a visual product designer for a national health nonprofit. I was green and am white so I didn’t know much of anything let alone systemic racism.
And like much of the nonprofit sector, the leadership…
Imposter Syndrome and all
Why is it so damn hard to write about myself?
Probably because I care too much what you think.
I’ve been writing stories since I can remember. In elementary school, my favorite assignment was always the writing prompt. When the teacher would put up the wacky hand-drawn transparency on the projector, my little mind would wander into all the different stories that could come out of one simple drawing.
Stories — and more importantly — storytelling has always interested me. Sometimes to a fault, as a memoirist and essayist, I’m regularly searching for the arc in my life that is…
Should infant influencers even exist?
Instead of deciding on newborn portraits at Sears or JCPenney like moms of the past, modern moms and dads are faced with the conversation of social media, and how much they want — or don’t want their newborn to be featured on it.
My husband and I were no exception to this. I was on team social media. We have family who lives far and I want them to see our daughter in all her wonderful stages of development. He was on team analog. …
I’m tired of not feeling good enough.
I’m tired of the self-help, “become a six-figure freelancer in a week” articles. There are so many. They’re all over my Medium home page because I cannot for the life of me resist clicking them. Worst, I read them too. Which is probably why folks still write them.
Yes, all-powerful successful person, I want to be like you, tell me how you did it, let me replicate it, and be rich and happy all while working 4 hours a week.
I’m tired of these articles because they almost never write about their personal lives. Which is a huge component in…
HOW I DID IT
There’s a lot of unpaid work in writing full-time
No, I don’t have a course that you need to sign up for. I’m not entirely confident I have anything to teach, anyway. I don’t have a killer e-book for you to download.
I don’t even really know what Substack is. I can confirm I have no idea what Clubhouse is. And I’ve been rejected from News Break. (Am I even a writer?) Truth is, I don’t have much of anything to offer other than exactly what I do every month to bring in a sustainable income for a reasonable amount of work.
One universal truth of the game is…
The ethics of pro-life and pro-choice
I have always been a hard and fast pro-choicer when it comes to abortion. My views were black and white. Pro-choice was correct. Pro-life was wrong. I thought all women, regardless of their age, type of conception, reason, etc were the only ones to decide what to do with their body and the fertilized egg. Not anyone else.
But age, sex, and pregnancy changed all that.
I remember one Halloween in seventh grade my friends and I had just finished trick or treating around the neighborhood. We were in the sweet spot of adolescence, departing childhood and entering our teen…
Neither of us knows how to use it.
My father-in-law, Robert, suddenly passed away two weeks ago. Leaving the entire family in a state of shock and heartbreak. We weren’t ready to say goodbye to Grandpa.
He had passed away from a heart attack with his wife by his side. He was watering the grass, getting ready to visit with my small family in Austin the next day. In his room was a bag half-packed with goodies for our seven-month-old. He was so excited to make the monthly trip to see her.
We were scheduled to have my in-laws visit for a week to help relieve us of…
The billionaire do-gooder arrogance is getting old.
Elon Musk announced on Twitter this week that he’s donating tens of millions of dollars to the US border city of Brownsville, Texas, and Cameron County schools.
I’m writing this from Brownsville, where I’m visiting with my husband’s family. We drove down here suddenly after the heartbreaking and unexpected death of my father-in-law, a retired Brownsville Police Commander and prominent community leader in the city. Every time I visit Brownsville, I learn more about this unique city, this trip has been no different.
From my first visit to South Padre Island to the one-of-a-kind Charro Days celebration, I’ve been entrenched…
4 lessons learned from using one for a month
Creating headlines is stressful. Writing 1,000 words has nothing on creating a short, attention-grabbing, non-clickbaity headline. It’s a lot of pressure. Often, I spend just as much time writing the headline as I do the story. I’m not very proud of that. But, if our headlines aren’t captivating, people won’t click them. If they’re too engaging, they could run the risk of being clickbait. I find it’s sometimes hard to strike a balance between engaging and clickbait.
This exact dilemma led to the creation of tools like this headline scorecard from ShareThough. I fell prey to this one tool after…
Do all writers feel this way?
Writing is perpetual self-flagellation. We air our vulnerability into the world only for it to be ripped apart by strangers on the other end of an unknown screen. That can only be defined as masochism, right? Why do we continue to do it? Some days I don’t know.
As a kid, I was always searching for praise. I wanted everyone to be proud of me. I wanted to excel in all the projects, get all the A’s, do all the things. I wanted to be on my best behavior so I could make the grown-ups proud. Writing has always been…
