Did I tell the truth in an inspirational memoir about my first depression? — Please don’t ask me My ex-husband, the man who saw me through multiple, wretched depressions, hands me a memoir I wrote 30 years ago and asks me to inscribe it for a depressed friend who is in bad shape who is in her first episode. “Really?” I ask him. “Really?” “Something inspirational,” he prompts…

Coming to the anniversary of my mother’s death — “All things come to an end. No, they go on forever.” Ruth Stone, “Train Ride” Losing love is messy. We are always too early or late. Our feelings are mixed and confusing. Our hearts break and reassemble. Our clothes don’t match. Images in our memories fade to almost non-existent, only…

There’s a payoff to opening yourself up to what you don’t understand, but seems like a good idea at the time — Priceless Moments Most of us live out our days, moment by moment. At the end of each day, we shake out the majority of those scraps, saving some because they were funny or moving, or hot, or intriguing. Sometimes they occurred at the intersection we have with a person we know or…

How we can manage life’s “disasters” with courage and calm — The daily experience of an anxiety disorder is that the majority of things we are anxious about, do not usually happen. But it doesn’t stop the pain. There is a rampant misunderstanding of clinical anxiety. It is easily dismissed by words like “nervous.” But that is like believing a brief…

I’ve been waiting for so long — I thought, by now, that we would sing. That the Isley Brothers would belt out, “This Old Heart of Mine,” Slow with my stiff back, I would bend, scoop you up, And we would approximate dancing. You would coo and squirm, against your terminally “white girl” Grandmother, always reaching for rhythm, though that train left her station…

Sometimes the least likely people can turn your head around Did you ever find yourself stuck at a fork in the road, and someone appears in your life and turns you upside down? My father did, and so did I. In need of a change My father’s last years as an F.B.I. agent were the…

Find new ways to observe and express magic in the moment — I sit in a noisy cafe or on a lonely beach, with nothing but my notebook and pen. I date the page. Nothing happens. I go nowhere. So, I wait. For something. For anything around me that will fuel the leap from my eye to my paper. It’s crap. …

Embracing joy and sorrow as we move through the twisting and turning threads that connect us forever — Last week I was gifted by the birth of my first granddaughter, Maxine. Unfortunately, she is far away, in Sweden. Maxine took her sweet time with every stage, from conception to baby girl. Her arrival was nothing short of a miracle. I lean into the computer screen to hear her…

Keep your expectations reasonable and decide how to express them. — One of the most certain things about relationships is that we are bound to hurt each other. It can be a bump, a gaffe, a loss, sarcasm, criticism, a guided missile of pain, abandonment, betrayal, cruelty, or any of the other ways people inflict pain on each other. We are…