Aprovechar

Dear Sally,
I know the age of 20 is confusing for you, so I’m traveling back in time to give you a heads-up about what’s coming in life. Feel relieved? Good.
Right now, at 20, you’re a girl consumed with swirls of emotions about nearly everything in life.  You feel battered by some of what’s come your [...]

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The older I get, the more I think success in life is about maintaining flexibility: to recognize when you need to change and to be ever willing to evolve.  It’s easy to want to stick with what has worked in the past, with what makes us feel secure, with what offers us a sense of [...]

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God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change:

uncertainty about where we’ll be living in a year (or less), and the emotional toll that brings;
ambivalence about whether my chosen grad school was the right path;
the fact that some of my queries [...]

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My mother’s voice cracked as she said, “Your father is moving out for a while.”
My mother stood in the doorway of my Spanish class with a packet that said, “Congratulations! We are pleased to admit you to the class of 2002.”
My ATM balance print-out read, “$ -362.00.”
My professor said, “This paper is graduate-school-level work.”
My boyfriend [...]

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“so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.”
–william carlos williams
I remember in high school, junior year, explications of William Carlos Williams’s poem. I remember learning that he was a doctor, a pediatrician. Someone (perhaps the text) suggested that Williams had written the poem after making a house call where a child died. [...]

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I think many of us spend so much of our lives with family members, role models, religious leaders and texts, self-help books, magazine articles, and other facets of society telling us to be ruled by self-control, via willpower, that it quickly becomes ingrained in us that immense willpower is essential for running the more difficult [...]

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When I quit my job, it seemed so plain to me:  I needed to quit my job. I love to write.  I had already researched freelance writing extensively.  The plan fit.  I knew the path wouldn’t be easy, but I felt pretty euphoric about it.
And then I crashed into an emotional wall and fell to [...]

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I was in a deep funk.
In the midst of packing boxes and making holiday plans and attending my grandmother’s funeral and trying to work in a half-empty apartment (part of the contents of which had already disappeared with their new owner), I unraveled.  I grew anxious and angry.
Why was it always my responsibility to make [...]

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We pulled off into the drive of an abandoned house that I wanted to photograph, and we got out of the car.  My husband’s irritation emanated in palpable waves—directed at me.  I wanted to shoot the house: we were two hours from home, and I didn’t know when or if I’d get the chance to [...]

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Though the year actually starts in January, some part of me will eternally cling to August and September as the time of new beginnings.  My mother was a teacher until recently, so my life took on the school year rhythm from birth.  Growing up, every year in fall, as the light turned golden and, at [...]

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