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  • I am a female working in a male dominated field. I am not self-employed. I punch a time clock and someone other than myself is the issuer of my paycheck. But I do feel as if I work alone, in isolation. I work in a male dominated industry. The pecentage of women in my industry…

  • The path toward mental health is strickly self defined. There are many roads to travel down, many tools to find. Some roads turn out to be dead ends , while some are so twisting and turning it feels like you never get anywhere. Some roads lead you back to where you were, sometimes time and…

  • This is the final installment of this short series. This was a labor of gratitude. A way to honor a life that had had given me so much. The truest form of honor is to be what my life lessons had taught me to be, her life lessons as they impacted my own. To be…

  • True story As my mom grew more financially secure as a single mother, she used some of her disposable income for things she had always wanted. Jewelry. Diamonds. She bought herself a pair of diamond stud earrings. When I was about 10 or 11 years old, we were robbed. The thief took our stereo, a…

  • Her life after the birth of my little brother bared little resemblance to her life before. She seemed settled within herself and her life. Her inconsistencies lost their edges. Her reactions to life, while never predictable, became less varied. She even resumed some of the more demanding activities of being a mother to her teenage…

  • Life wasn’t good, but it was better. She still struggled with money and her emotions, but slowly she was finding her footing. She had a home for her girls, family to rely on, friends who buoyed her confidence. Sitting around the mahjong table, she could gossip and laugh, acting out the fantasy of recapturing the…

  • It must have been hard to live with that knowledge. The sense of defeat must have been profound. To have come through a world war, a life of abject misery. To have struggled and survived. To have known a life of utter despair and darkness then to have moved her heart and soul back into…

  • I am not an art critic. Not by any means. What I know about art could fit in the proverbial pinhead. But I do know something of people. As a person who spends more time observing people more than interacting with them, I notice things I might have otherwise missed. But doesn’t it take much…

  • Her life took a turn she had not foreseen. Surviving, and leaving behind, the visual memories of the war, she thought she would never again feel the darkness of life closing in around her. During the long boat ride to America, she had imagined so many things. Dreamed more dreams than her childhood had been…

  • I have had canine companions almost my entire adult life. I remember them all and the affects they had on me and my life. The lessons they introduced to me in the form of affirmations or challenges have helped to make me who I am. Without them, not only would I be different, but life…