Posts in Life
I've Been Writing: Lessons from Self-Publishing

“I’VE BEEN WRITING.”

I told a close friend this right as our Christmas break started. I had spent the last few days in coffee shops recuperating from the fall semester. And by “recuperating,” I mean hours on end were spent sipping coffee and writing poetry. My goal for the break was to be more disciplined in writing poems—stretch my poems in length, depth, symbolism, imagery... and stretch myself in the process.

This wasn’t a decision on a whim, though. (I mean, who just decides to dedicate their Christmas break to being disciplined in poetry?)

As I was finishing the semester, I got an email saying five poems I submitted to a print magazine had all been rejected.

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A Song for the Nocturnal

I woke up again and knew I wasn’t going back to sleep.

The alarm wasn’t even close to waking up. The cracked light through my drapes showed the indigo sky—a shade I’ve come to refer to as “you’re not sleeping tonight” blue. I looked at my phone but already knew what it would read before the screen turned on: 3am.

It was the third night in a row I’ve woken up at this time. In the past, options to tackle this insomnia were aplenty: I could go back to sleep after a drink of water. I could read and drift off. I could even play some video games until sleep lulled me back. But lately, my mind pulls the body along a joyride of thought. It starts and doesn’t stop. It has become loud and uncontrollable, like a child. In dead silence this time brings, my mind wakes before my body can at 3am.

3am. Historically, I’ve gotten along with this time.

One could say I’ve preferred the night in my life.

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A Millennial Learning From Gen Z

Miraculously, and I do not say that lightly, I was hired at my dream school as an adjunct professor.

Up until August of 2020, I had little to no interaction to the generation monikered Gen Z.

I let a few years lapse between undergrad and grad school and managed to only have night classes. Like I do with anyone of any age, I don’t judge them based off of assumptions and stereotypes.

That is until the night before I began teaching.

I couldn’t sleep as worries pummeled me: Did my outfit portray I’m cool but also professional? Do they even say “cool”? Will they listen to me? Will my examples relate?

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When Life Feels Small

I hit a car in a parking garage once.

Nothing bad, really, just a ding in the door from a turn cut just a little too tight.

Truthfully, my car suffered the brunt of the bunt. But the other car was a nice one. I don’t remember the make or model—I’m not really a car person—but I do remember it was a convertible. Someone dropped a lotta dollars on this depreciating piece of metal, and I had just chipped paint off the gleaming door. Big yikes.

All because I was in a rush to get to my doctor’s appointment.

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Practicing (and Failing at) Grace on the Road

Last week, I got stuck in a traffic jam on the interstate.

I was in a line of cars needing to merge into the bedlam of backed-up vehicles. We had an organized system in place, me and the cars in front of me: a car merged, then the car behind that car merged, and so on. I made my way into a gap between two 18-wheelers, neatly following the rules like the good girl I am.

But then—l'horreur!—what did the cars behind me do? Speed down the on-ramp in an effort to get ahead by usurping the follow-the-leader system of merging we had all tacitly agreed upon.

Teacher, they’re cutting!

I was… not happy.

Anne Lamott writes, “Sometimes the movement of grace looks like letting other people go first.”

That’s nice.

Here’s what I did instead.

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When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

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A Song for Embracing the Present Moment

Despite the sun’s rays and the heightened sense of joy in the air that wafted like perfume, I was feeling gray. Over the year, COVID-19 made me uncertain about my future. In my life, like most people, the pandemic revealed certain aspects of life that weren’t previously apparent. Maybe for some it was relationship issues. Maybe it was cabin fever or job uncertainty.

In my case, my career path was no longer clear. I was increasingly aware of this fact as the days dragged on in isolation. Throw in the economic flux of the job market, a splash of consistent restlessness, and you have a cocktail of underlying anxiety.

Caught in a web of thought and analysis-paralysis, I often spent more time pondering the future than acknowledging the present day.

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A Holy Yes to the Real Things: On Setting Social Media Boundaries

Two and a half hours.

That’s how long I had spent on my phone that day. Reading emails, sure. Responding to texts, some. Catching up on news, a bit. But mostly: scrolling through Instagram.

I had spent an hour of my day clicking through clips of someone else’s life. The sad truth? Some days, I’ve spent way more than just one hour lost to Instagram.

This is where the High School Musical cast flash mobs my brain with “we’re all in this together”—because my educated guess is that you can relate to this daily scroll-fest, too.

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What Do You Want?

My life in Nashville almost didn’t happen.

Originally, I had planned to go to college with my best friend. We’d be roommates and our dorm would be cute and coordinated thanks to Target’s budget-quality Room Essentials™.

We visited Belmont University in Nashville together. I loved it, but it wasn’t the place for her. That’s okay, I thought, I’ll just go to the other school we had both applied for, the one securely situated within my home state’s borders. A cute and coordinated Room Essentials™ dorm could still be a reality.

But then she chose another school.

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How Did I Get Here?

When I ask this question, it comes with a catch. Here is often both fragmented and full — this the paradox of almost all that is lovely. Here seems to accept that the gift of being human is the gradient of emotion we can hold, if we want. Here makes space to deeply believe one thing and even its complete opposite at the same time.

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For Such a Time As This: A Note to Fellow Creatives

“For such a time as this” rang in my head as I posted a late-night progression of thoughts in an Instagram post.

I’m a writer who does her best work when feeling “inspired,” I’ll readily admit it . I don’t do great with planned posts, most of the time, or content that get fits into a particular niche.

I write when inspiration hits, and it was no different in light of the events of January 6th.

Watching white insurrections storm the capitol that day, my shock quickly found its voice in Instagram captions and messages with friends.

But I left out some of my own “inspired” words. I didn’t “finish” what I wrote that night.

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Cheers to 6 Years: A Reflection on 6 Years of Windrose

Today, Windrose turns 6 years old.

But we barely made it here.

At the start of this year, I had made the decision to write “the end” to the story of Windrose. These parts of the Internet woods had been relatively quiet throughout 2019, anyways—largely in part due to my own wrinkled creativity and my mental energy siphoned off solely to my copywriting business. I had even emailed a core group of writers to let them know of my decision to let Windrose go quietly into that good night.

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Looking on the Bright Side: On Feeling Stagnant in a Global Pandemic

Now each day blends into the next. I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that it’s September already. What have I accomplished?

My bed has a me-shaped impression in it from sitting in it so much. I spend my days seeing how many episodes of Love Island I can bear to watch in 24 hours. Work is hard to concentrate on when there isn’t a separation between me time and work time, since me time and work time both take place in the same room.

My heart aches for normalcy, for my friends, my family, for change, for growth. The pandemic has made me feel so… stagnant.

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You Are Worth It: A Journey to Discovering Your Voice & Worth

In November of 2019, two weeks before my wedding, I called it off.

It was the hardest conversation I have ever had, and it created a domino effect of more difficult conversations with practically everyone in my inner circle. And those conversations created a ripple effect of embarrassing moments with acquaintances and co-workers.

The most difficult part of all of it was that no one saw it coming. Not even me.

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Who You Are Now: On Outgrowing Earlier Versions of Yourself

In the last few months, I’ve realized, much to my dismay, that I look older. That I am aging. This sounds dramatic coming from an able-bodied twenty-seven-year old, but it’s true. I didn’t know I found so much worth and security in the way that I looked until I started to notice a difference.

As humans, we note the passing of time in the changes around us. The tree that was once green is now orange, now yellow, now brown and bare. The crack on the stoop starts to grow weeds and crumble. The basil plant gets bigger, the dust on the shelf gets thicker, and the water stain on the ceiling expands to look like a dinosaur. We note these changes with surprise, as if they’ve happened all of a sudden instead of one day at a time.

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