Videos

I lived my life like a square peg in a round hole. I gave up an early, promising relationship I desperately wanted because I was too scared to express how I felt. I tried hard to fit in with city life even though I always wanted to move some place quieter. I didn’t share what I needed and constantly tried to meet the needs of others. I thought I wanted to make the world a better place, that I wanted to be a good person, but I didn’t start with my own needs. I couldn’t, because I didn’t know what those needs were.

When I was young, I read the story of Little Buddha. In this story, Little Buddha spent a great deal of time looking for his keys outside of his home. He couldn’t find them and, after a while, his friend came to help him. After neither had any luck, his friend asked where he might have last seen the keys...

When I decided this past summer to move into my own apartment after years of living with roommates, my anxiety took over completely.

“Idiot,” it hissed after I signed a lease on a beautiful little place in a not-quite-nice area. “How the fuck do you think you’re ready for this? You can’t afford it, it’s not safe, you’ll regret it, you chose wrong.” Really, what it translated to was this: I hated not knowing the future, not being able to chart the edges of my life and promise myself it would all be OK. One day, shortly before I moved, I stayed home from work because I had such a strong panic attack that I threw up mucus all over my sheets. I put the sheets in the bathtub, called my mom, and then, in order to stave off another wave of nausea, began knitting a mustard-yellow sweater...