mental health journalist
I’m waking up for the 17th time since 3:27 a.m. and my cellphone is lighting up with a barrage of texts. I grab my coffee, sit up in bed and look at my screen. I notice that, despite the weather warnings, the sun is fully out though the threat of rain remains all week. I…
I said goodbye today to the first fur baby my husband and I had together. Ani Grey came home with us from the shelter six or so weeks after her Easter Sunday birthday in 2008. Her tiny grey paws stretched for the strings hanging from my skirt and she got her claw stuck. “Oh, kitty,”…
I gave the egg a chance even though it arrived from the store cracked. I found my plastic slotted spoon – in the wrong kitchen drawer – and looked at the broken egg. When the water boiled, I lowered the white spoon slowly, allowing the egg to ease into the pot like a person entering…
On my first day of middle school, I ran around the cafeteria, inhaling the hashbrown aroma, and asking kids for their phone numbers, collecting connections as proof of friendship. I came across as desperate and weird. I didn’t last long in public school. As a married woman with children, I still feel awkward telling someone…
I’m not sure whether it’s all in my head that Ani the cat is experiencing dementia. I question, also, whether experiencing dementia makes one demented. She’s 17 now, the first fur baby my husband and I adopted as an engaged couple. Russell proposed to me on March 19, 2008, with a song that he wrote…
My husband and I drove to Atlanta in a time machine to see Marilyn Manson at the Tabernacle on May 20, 2025. By that, I mean I went to recreate my experience of following the band’s first headlining tour for the band’s 1994 release Portrait of an American Family, when I was a teenager and…
Jarrett places his notebook and pen on the tabletop, and a bald man in a blue, buttoned-down collared shirt and shorts approaches. “Got your laptop?” the bald man asks. “I had a lot going on this week; I didn’t get any Mp3s done,” Jarrett says as another man approaches and hears the news. “I’ll catch…
Breathe in, feel the air over the water. Breathe out, hear the crash of the waves against a concrete shoreline. My go-to breathing place in my mind is on top of a rock in the winds on a cloudy day about 73 degrees and cloudy and breezy like fall weather in the northeastern United States….
It was Mother’s Day in 2002 when I called home and Mom wasn’t there. Dad said she took my little sister and left. “What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely confused. He told me her clothes were gone. He didn’t know where she went. I was living in Baltimore, Maryland, attending University of Maryland Baltimore…
Mom held my hand as I regained consciousness in the emergency room, but her blurry body moved as the doctor rushed to extubate me. My throat felt like one of those turtles with a plastic straw embedded in its nose. Mom backed off and my empty hand fell to the side of the hospital bed….