Tragedies are hard enough; lies make it all so much worse.

I wrote what I need now. I need this perspective. I need to calm down. I need to stop scrolling. I need to make sense of it. I need to learn and understand. I need to have the pleasant AI voice read this to me via the Substack app while I close my eyes and rub my hands with balm that I was given as a gift at Christmas.

But, first, a story. Since I hadn’t yet done any of that yet, my body made me stop and listen to how much it needed me to calm down.

Coping skills and the art of not making it worse.

Working at Hazelden Publishing while in recovery from alcoholism put me in a strange, privileged position: I spent my days immersed in language about behavioral and mental health while being someone with what’s called “lived experience.” My lived experience helped me see a broader view with each new concept I learned. I watched Twelve Step Facilitation, trauma work, and therapies like Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) circle the same human problems from different angles, often as if they were separate worlds instead of dance partners.

We don't necessarily ever close a door, but we can stop jiggling the handle.

Closure is one of those concepts that sounds soothing and grown‑up, like something a therapist with good glasses would prescribe. “What you really need is closure.” Oh, perfect. Where do you pick that up? Costco? Can I get it online?

The more it gets examined, the more “closure” feels less like a feeling and more like a story the brain tells itself so it can stop running worst‑case scenarios in the background. I find a lot of comfort in this way of viewing it. It is less about being “over it” and more about simplifying prediction: if the brain thinks it knows how the story goes, it doesn’t have to keep refreshing the page.​

When we can’t talk about one without the other.

“Dry January” is rolling back around, right on cue. Often paired with the New Year and resolutions, we inkblot-test January 1 with starts and stops. “Sober October” shows up the same way. These trends get marketed as resets or detoxes, but underneath, they are invitations to step back and look at our relationship with alcohol—how much, how often, and at what cost. Dry‑month campaigns are linked with decreased drinking, better mood, improved sleep, and healthier lab markers for many people in the months that follow, which is classic harm‑reduction territory: turning the dial down, not necessarily ripping it out of the wall.​

I'm really good at starting. I start all the time. Again and again.

We’ve all been there: standing at the edge of something new, waiting for the stars to align.

We tell ourselves we’ll start when we feel more motivated, when the house is quiet, when the kids are older, when the calendar flips to January, when we finally have a plan that feels “solid.” We hold off, hoping for perfect conditions, as if the right moment will guarantee success.

The myth underneath all of that is simple: we think a good start requires perfect conditions. That if we begin too soon, too messy, too small, it won’t count. That we need to be ready, confident, and fully equipped before we can really begin.

A crash course in cognitive decline (and remapping) as we celebrate the holidays.

On Friday, I went with my dad to what has become his now-annual neurology assessment. This was only his second one since moving into our new house after living a few years of a somewhat chaotic life in Assisted Living with my mother, a season marked by temporal amnesia, vascular dementia, and a caregiver breakdown as the pandemic raged and isolation suffocated them both. We had moved him into care because we needed help; now I was trying to build something that looked more like stability.

Beloved holiday trope or a cosmic performance review? Cue the sad trombone.

I grew up with the Naughty and Nice Lists like many of us did. It’s everywhere—on TV specials, in school hallways, whispered by adults with a wink: “Better behave or Santa won’t come.” It sounded harmless, even magical, until it stopped feeling like a story and started feeling like paperwork—a cosmic spreadsheet quietly sorting people into good and bad, worthy and unworthy. At eight years old, that felt like a game; at forty-eight, it looks suspiciously like a cultural shorthand for judgment that outlasts the lights and the tree.​

Right-sizing our perceptions of trauma can keep the pipeline to healing open.

The Guardian recently published a piece exploring how the term trauma has been commodified in the attention economy. The author, Katherine Rowland, warns that when influencers package pain as content, clinical nuance gets lost—and complex suffering becomes a meme. The article lays out how trauma has become a cultural currency—overflowing in self‑help books, social media, and wellness industries—turning real suffering into monetized content that draws clicks and capital. It shows how platforms reward and amplify emotional vulnerability, encouraging people to recast ordinary struggles as trauma in order to find belonging, validation, or financial gain. And it issues an urgent reminder: naming pain can be lifesaving—but when trauma becomes a brand, we risk diluting its meaning and losing the depth that drives true healing. Yet, the solution isn’t to abandon the word. It’s to use it wisely.

When I got sober and, years later, sought help for my eating disorder, the urge to find the reason was so strong. I wanted the answer—the one thing that explained why this was happening. But discovering that there isn’t one reason, that there are multiple reasons, was huge. It changed everything.

I remember sitting with one therapist—I won’t say they’re all amazing; I had two clinkers over the years—and saying something like, “Oh, my parents said such and such, and I reacted like such and such.” She quickly cut in: “There’s no point in you just looking for someone to blame.” I told her I wasn’t. I was looking for understanding, to trace something to its origin. She was not great.

Why I hate the term and why it matters.

As much as I talk about remapping myself, neuroplasticity, and neural pathways, I seem to avoid saying “nervous system.” It feels like a misnomer—like it’s about being anxious, jittery, or on edge. And that’s not what it is at all.

The nervous system is our body’s master communication network. It’s not a mood. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a system—an elegant, lightning-fast relay of signals that keeps us alive and functioning.

Remapping in action.

When life cracks under the weight of trauma, our first instinct is survival—patching the breaks, holding things together with whatever we’ve got. But sometimes, after the dust settles, something unexpected happens: growth. We call this Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG). And here’s the key—it’s not about going back to who we were before. That’s resilience: bouncing back. PTG is about transformation. It’s about becoming someone new because of what we’ve endured.

How numbness is full of feeling.

I had carpal tunnel release surgery on my right wrist this Monday. These procedures are so common and streamlined now that I barely had time to sit down before I was back out in the wild with a snip and a wrap. My hand had been pumped full of lidocaine and epinephrine—the first to knock out the nerves, the second to knock out the bleeding. It all went beautifully. Quick, efficient, and by all accounts, successful.

But I hate the numbness so much. God, I hate it.

It all counts.

After some heavy conversations—grief, stress, and the weight of the holidays—this article is meant to lift us up. It’s a reminder that healing isn’t only about hard things. Progress, growth, and recovery aren’t punishments or proof that something was broken; they’re invitations to evolve. They’re about movement, expansion, and restoration—sometimes after pain, but often toward possibility. Understanding the difference matters for how we measure ourselves, how we heal, and how we remap the way we think.

The day after Thanksgiving can feel like a minefield of “shoulds.”

The turkey is gone, the dishes are mostly done, and suddenly the inner commentator shows up with a clipboard. We should feel grateful. We should not eat leftovers. We should get up early for Black Friday deals. We should be productive on our day off. It sounds like accountability, but the tone is more courtroom than compass. “Shoulds” tend to flatten the complexity of our lives into a binary: either we obey the rule or we fail. On holidays—when grief, recovery, family systems, and cultural scripts collide—those rules can feel louder, harsher, and more absolute.

Sometimes the train wreck isn't a train wreck.

We can usually predict when we’re heading into a situation that could trigger us. This isn’t our first holiday rodeo. We know the stress points: family dynamics, travel logistics, food and drink choices, and the emotional weight of traditions.

Most of us have a mental highlight (lowlight?) reel of past holidays—the moments that went sideways, the conversations that left us tense, the feelings that lingered long after the dishes were done. So when we sense that familiar knot in our stomach, it’s not because we’re imagining things. It’s because experience has taught us what’s hard.

These were too easy to write. Probably because I've thought most of them.

Thanksgiving is often painted as starting a season of warmth and joy, but for many people, it’s tangled with old habits, cultural expectations, and unhelpful patterns of thinking. If you’re working on remapping yourself—learning to spot and shift these patterns—the holiday can be a powerful moment to notice what keeps you stuck in scarcity, shame, or perfectionism. It’s the perfect time to build mastery as you address them.

Living on high alert: this is fine.

Hypervigilance is one of those words that shows up in therapy offices and trauma books, but, too often, we don’t really know we’re living it until we finally step out of it—and realize how long we’ve been on high alert.

Hypervigilance is more than feeling “on edge”—it’s a psychological state that can reshape our experience of everyday life. Whether we’re navigating trauma, anxiety, caregiving, or the weight of chronic stress, hypervigilance primes our minds and bodies for threat, even when none is present. It’s a legacy of survival, and it can be exhausting. I’ll keep this article out of the political space, but want to acknowledge how many of us have to live our lives in a perpetual state of hypervigilance. Many people, more than others. There is privilege in a lack of hypervigilance, both systemic and personal.

Why we're told to keep gratitude journals (even when we hate them).

Cognitive distortions—are shortcuts our brains use when we’re stressed, overwhelmed, or trying to make sense of uncertainty. They simplify reality, but they do it at a cost: accuracy, nuance, and hope.

Cognitive distortions aren’t random. They tend to cluster around the same themes: safety, control, worth, and belonging. They show up when we need reassurance, when we’re trying to protect ourselves from disappointment, or when we’re searching for certainty in a world that rarely offers it.

Even doing nothing is doing something.

Motivation is one of those words that gets tossed around a lot—especially in recovery, caregiving, and career change conversations. But what does it actually mean? And why does it sometimes feel so slippery?

It’s not just about drive or discipline. Motivation is the internal process that moves us toward action. It’s the “why” behind what we do—or don’t do. And it’s shaped by everything: our values, our nervous systems, our relationships, our histories. It’s not fixed. It’s not moral. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a signal. And like any signal, it can be distorted, drowned out, or misinterpreted.

Lasting change requires more than a myth.

Humans love the idea of a silver bullet—a single, perfect solution that will fix everything. It’s a comforting thought: if we just find the right product, the right habit, the right tweak, life will fall into place. Psychology has some fun names for this mindset: panacea thinking, magical thinking, the quick-fix mentality. Sometimes it shows up as all-or-nothing thinking, where success means total transformation and anything less feels like failure. Other times it’s the illusion of control, the belief that if we micromanage every detail, we can engineer happiness.

These patterns are seductive because they promise certainty and speed. But they ignore complexity—and they set us up for disappointment.