I almost drowned in Puerto Rico and I didn’t know it. My friend and I rented boogie boards from a sea urchin type of guy who knew the rhythm of the beach better than anything else. He told us to stay on the left side of the rocks. My friend and I chatted up a woman who mentioned something about sewage being on that side of the rocks. Two slightly tipsy city girls who didn’t know how to swim decided to go against experience so we did our own thing.
Not long after me and the boogie board parted ways…
I knew I had to move, but I was surprised by my resistance.
I change my hair a lot. With relationships, I love hard, process it and get on with it.
As a banking consultant, I was on various projects a year — different organizational cultures, different procedures, sometimes different cities.
However, I counterbalanced change with my retreat from the world: my home. I didn’t move much growing up — one apartment in Washington Heights and a house in Carol City is all I knew until I was 17. My mother loved making a home — she knitted bedspreads, she…
Trigger Warning: Bodily Injury, Illness
The aggy feeling I woke up with in Brooklyn when I thought of my dad disappeared when I arrived so I knew I made the right choice in following my intuition. I was in Santo Domingo less than 2 weeks when my dad’s health began to decline. I correct people when they say what luck I am here because it has nothing to do with luck; I answered a call and organized my life to follow through with it. What was on the other side of the call is up to God.
I barely knew…
Being emotionally unavailable and forever busy already was.
Picture it: it’s 2004 — before social media, WhatsApp and our hyper-connectivity. In two weeks I will be in Cuba for two months to write the great historical fiction novel. I quit my banking job. I pack every cute outfit and all the Allende novels I can.
There was only one issue.
I fell in love.
There was no cellphone service and calls to the US were about $4 per minute. There was email, but WiFi was non existent and internet cafes were few and far between.
We agreed to write letters, but not mail them. I wrote about being…
I will be 40 this year and my God, this isn’t what I thought it would be like. I built a business I am proud of and co-founded an organization for women in the sex tech space that’s kicking ass. Yet, I am surviving life. I am engaging with life like it’s a long ride on an old, rickety bus — slow with frustrating jolts leaving behind clouds of exhaust. I wake up berating myself for all the things I hadn’t gotten done. I spend too much of the day figuring out how a bill will be paid or how…
And what you can do about it
I was at dinner with two female entrepreneurial rock stars discussing our favorite topics: business and money. One mentioned if you owed money to people it was a sign of your character. I sat there silent with my all too familiar shame, wondering if I would be found out. I took a big gulp of wine. Still more silence. You see, I am that person my friend was talking about. I owe a lot. $145,552.87 to be exact.
No one drowns in debt. You drown in your shame about debt.
In her book Daring Greatly, Dr. Brené Brown defines shame…
