Posts

"An Unmarried Woman"

  After an almost two-year hiatus from blog post writing (The term “blogging” is just horrid. Don’t even get me started on “vlogging.”), I finally have the life experience, perspective, frame of mind, and time to start again. My posts always take shape over the course of weeks, months, or even years. I have a thought about something, and that thought collects another thought and then another and so on and so forth until, finally, an entire cohesive essay is formed. It’s kind of like gestation; I’ll call it Rhetorical Gestation (trademark coming soon)!  I’d like to offer a disclaimer upfront: This post isn’t political. It feels like everything is a political statement these days, and it’s maddening. This post is about years, centuries even, of experience and the general idea that feminism is somehow bad, which reflects an inherent misunderstanding of feminism. So, now that that’s out of the way - here is my newest bundle of rhetorical joy…or something like that.  Several ...

All the Good Words Have Left My Mouth

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  “All the good words have left my mouth / I’m completely out of things to say about it now.”  When the song “Halloween” by Novo Amor popped up on a Spotify playlist several weeks ago and those two lines opened the song, I turned the volume up. It’s not a song about having writer’s block after losing a parent, but it might as well have been. “That’s it,” I thought. “All the good words have left my mouth. I’m completely out of things to say about it now.” And I am. I don’t know where my good words have gone, but they’re certainly not here. I wish that I could write something achingly beautiful, a graceful, poignant tribute to my mother, but I can’t. I so very much want to give her something beautiful, but all of my good words are scattered and what’s left just sounds like tin rattling around in my mouth.  A perceptive friend once observed, “You process trauma through writing, don’t you?” Until he recognized and identified this aspect of my writing, I’d honestly not reali...