How to deconstruct your fear: an exercise

The first thing to say to a friend in need.

Well, that sucks. That’s the very first place to start. Sympathy is a healer, it coagulates the bleeding. It won’t drag them down if you validate their pain. It doesn’t mean you condone how they got into the pickle, or the fact that they may be bitching about the same chump after seven years, or that they done gone did it again — or any of that fairly useless judgement and assessing…

How to deconstruct your fear: an exercise

Passion over perfection. Love over politics. The Story of Mrs. Mulvey.

I was in a special English class in high school, the one for the word geeks and bookworms. That was me in the front row with big hair and leg warmers, talking Bronte and Shakespeare. Mrs. Mulvey, my English teacher, was on the outside of my teen drama (and there was a lot of drama back then — I left home when I was sixteen), and we rarely spoke out of class, but how she treated me quietly influenced my entire creative career