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 interesting for the reader. …
But what’s behind them could impact it.
Every June we see corporations and massive Fortune 500 companies changing their logos in solidarity with Pride. In October, the rainbows are replaced with pink ribbons. And this past summer, unlike any summer in history, we saw company’s changing their logos, messages, and offers to align with the Black Lives Matter movement.
From a marketing and communications perspective, I have questions. For one, are these marketing efforts authentic? Are these companies of action, or just vision?
Let’s dive into whether or not changing a logo to be of solidarity really helps change our inequitable systems of racial injustice. …
Our views on God are very different.
As a young child, my mother was a Deacon of the Presbyterian church, she taught Sunday School. I was too young to remember this. After she remarried my stepfather, who was Jewish, she stopped teaching Sunday School.
When he and my mom married I was only four-years-old. I was too young to even really understand religion when they married. But when our home blended with him and my stepbrother, we started observing the celebratory Jewish holidays at my grandmother’s house. We had a blended Roshashana, Passover, and an even more blended Hannukah.
My grandmother, who was not my biological grandmother, didn’t treat me and my brother any different than her Jewish grandchildren. On one night of Hannukah, we would all gather at her house around the Menorah and she would have us tell her the story of Hannukah. …
Things I’ve learned from Marie Kondo, two years later.
Here I am. Two years after my husband and I went through our belongings and decided to dive into The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. In 2018, we did all the things. We went through each piece of clothing and junk drawer item. We’d hold the piece up to our hearts and ask: do I love you? Did I love you once?
And for all the things we loved once we threw away. And all the items we still loved, we kept. And for the things we kept, everything had a home. We learned how to fold our socks into neat little squares so they’d be more efficient in their drawers. …
The first weeks of your child’s life are challenging.
Before I gave birth to my daughter I had planned and planned and planned, and I still wasn’t prepared. I naively thought I had everything ready to go. I was one of those moms that went into full-on nesting mode in my third trimester.
- The nursery was complete. From wallpaper to closet organization.
- Plastic bins labeled and organized by nipple flow. Yes, really.
- Baby clothes were washed, tags removed, and neatly put in their place.
- The bassinet was set up right next to our bed.
- Home-cooked meals were prepared and frozen, ready for postpartum dinners.
I had prepared so much for her arrival that I didn’t think too much about what I would need in the days following her birth. I knew that there would be an obligatory healing process, I just had no idea how to actually prepare for that. …
Demographic labels can divide people and a country.
On January 6th, 2021 I was sitting on the couch, still coming down from the holiday excitement. I was in my pajamas watching daytime television with my mom, who was still in town visiting. My four-month-old daughter was laying innocently between us staring intently at her hands.
My mom was preoccupied with her phone and turned to me, “Turn on the news,” she said concerned.
We clicked on NBC and couldn’t believe what we saw. It wasn’t that I couldn’t believe there were protests at the electoral vote certification, but that MAGA supporters were walking around the Capitol with little resistance from law enforcement. We saw American flags being lackadaisically dragged on the ground, confederate flags waving, and lots and lots of blue Trump flags. …
My journey to understand trans identity through parenting
One night after my husband and I put our 4-month daughter to bed he turned to me and asked:
Is it weird that I forget she’s a girl sometimes?
I laughed, because sometimes when she’s wearing androgynous clothes I look down at her feeding at my breast and don’t see gender at all. I just see a tiny living blob that is (too quickly) learning how to be a human in this world.
She looks at her hands in awe and amazement. She blows raspberries. Sometimes she forgets how to blow raspberries and has to concentrate really hard. She splashes the water with her chubby legs during her baths. …
Trolls, haters, and spam oh my!
Six months ago I received my first thoughtful hate comment.
Patriarchy prefers it this way.
I’m sitting at my computer troubleshooting an issue for work, the man on the other end of the chat is professional and responsive. He has virtually no typos and is ‘speaking’ in clear and concise sentences, helping me solve the issue with my website that I don’t quite understand.
While I try to process the complex issue he’s breaking down via text, I’m nursing my squirmy four-month-old in my computer chair. My responses are ridden with non-intended cryptic typos and awful grammar. My daughter’s preoccupied with the fan above us and keeps turning away from my breast to look at the fan. This means every time she comes back for more she needs a bit of help finding her food. So I help her because if I don’t that means my website issue is more important than my daughter eating. …
Let’s talk about our role in upholding racism.
I am you. I’m not someone else telling you your role and complacency in white supremacy. I’m not someone else. I am you. I, too, am a white woman who has been a part of the strategy conversations, through equity and inclusion training, and a part of the well-intentioned program development to combat the very institution that pays our bills. I am you. Our work is based on white supremacist ideals, we know this.
We ask ourselves daily, what is our role in ending the vitriol and racism? What power do we have to yield and to relinquish? How do we use it and how can we do better? …
