• palm seed and moss on log
    Life

    The Rescuers

    “Do it your bloody self!”That was pretty much the catchphrase from my childhood.Can you tell me how to spell this word?“Look it up in the dictionary.”I don’t think I can fix this.“You haven’t tried hard enough then.” Resilience.That’s what they called it.While I may have grown up ahead of my peers in problem solving, abstract thinking, and a ridiculous amount of independence, I was also way ahead of them in hypervigilance, social anxiety, and a belief that to ask for help was shameful and bound in obligation and ridicule. I didn’t mind other people asking for help, and I gladly help others, but they seemed somehow different from me, and…

  • Writing

    So what’s your book about?

    So what’s the book about, and what’s its genre? Ugh! That question always shuddered through my body no matter how prepared I was. I’d often stand there stuttering like an idiot. I knew what my book was about, but how to articulate it was the problem. We all deal with labels. They’re shorthand for us, and when people asked about Crown of Fire, they were asking for a label. Something they could assign it and create a narrative we could build an understanding around. Many courses advise authors to force their ideas into a category; to chop and change to fit them into a specific genre, paying particular attention to…