As soon as the thunder cracked, I knew it was going to be bad. Another twenty minutes and I don’t think I would have made it out at all. An entire section of 89A had already turned into a flowing river.

Before navigating out of the torrential downpour, I spent half an hour in my Jeep crying, wishing and praying that I didn’t have this independent streak and that there was someone else I could hand control over to that would just magically get done what I had to do and then do about 18 other things.

In April of…

I’m ill-prepared for this. Every day I wake up with one more reminder that I am heading around the curve toward 50. I don’t necessarily feel old. I surely don’t act like it. Still, I get little reminders of this like horribly rude Post-it notes someone left in my jacket pocket for me to find. “Your glasses are on your head.” “You have no idea why you’re in this room.” “Sure. Eat that. This should be fun.”

I’ve started taking inventory. I am here to be a cautionary tale and a warning label all in one. Why? Because Judy Blume…

Ten years ago I had a goal. Back then, having such goals was part of who I was. I was a go-getter. A corporate and social climber. I was a member of the Junior League and on my way to a vice presidency at my company. My goal: Phoenix Business Journal’s “40 under 40.”

The list is exactly what you think it is. The 40 most successful, innovative, and influential pre-midlife professionals in the 5th largest metropolitan area in the country. Damn.

I did everything I could think of to meet this goal. I sat on three different boards. I…

Being a feminist ain’t easy. It’s also not unlike being a writer. I can tell ten different people I’m a writer and they have ten different ideas about what that looks like. I can also get ten different writers in a room and hear ten different perspectives about what they do and why.

For me, the hardest thing to navigate as a feminist is relationships. Over the last couple of decades, how women cultivate relationships, behave inside of them and find satisfaction in them has significantly changed.

After decades of climbing corporate ladders, smashing glass ceilings, and generally taking over…

I fell off the happy wagon in May. Hard. Sadly, I had no idea. Funny thing about the happy wagon? It does not care whether or not you’re still sitting back there like a six-year-old on a hayride. If you fall off, it will keep right on going without you.

By the time I realized I was sitting in the middle of the road with scrapes on my legs, the happy wagon was far, far away. I had left myself out there ready to be hit by a car labeled “miserable”.

That’s no place to leave ourselves. But it creeps…

It was like a commercial. A weird, old commercial I had no intention of ever starring in, but my boyfriend has this uncanny knack for making life seem like a commercial from 1987. It’s an odd talent.

“No! NO! Don’t rinse it! We’re gonna put the dishwasher to a test!” The “it” in question was a pan in which I had made homemade lasagna. You hear it don’t you? “Let’s see if this new Frigidaire dishwasher and Cascade detergent packs can clean this caked-on, baked-on mess!”

I’d like to be able to say that my boyfriend didn’t actually say these…

I heard someone say that a common trait of empaths is that we have a tendency to watch the same movies and shows over and over. There’s a reason for this: we know how it ends. The last thing we want in this world is a juicy plot twist where something happens and we are ill-prepared for it emotionally. I know, we’re a special bunch. Game of Thrones destroyed us for years.

The Senate Impeachment hearing is my departure from this habit. I could not bring myself to watch. I flat out refused.

I refused for the same reason why…

The 2016 election delivered an electric shock that breathed life into the alt-right like the shock that brought Frankenstein’s monster to life. The power behind the shock was hatred. White-hot, racist, homophobic, sexist, “f*ck your feelings” hatred.

If there’s one thing we have come to understand about the alt-right it’s that its foundation is built on hate and the concept of collectively loathing the same things. There’s a unity that comes from hating all of the same people. A dysfunctional unity, but a unity nonetheless.

When a xenophobic man took the stage over several months and won a fight against…