Thoughts and reflections
Essays
These are the essays I write — honest, unfinished thoughts on the themes that Daisy and I keep returning to together.
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4–6 minutes
One wall at a time
A cold half-finished room, a dog asleep on my feet, and a wall I’m learning to paint. It turns out this is what I’d been waiting for all along.
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Painting all the red flags white
Everyone talks about missing the red flags. I didn’t miss a single one. I just kept painting them white.
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3–5 minutes
Was it me?
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Permission to not be ok
I am missing someone today. Not in a big, dramatic way. It’s softer, smaller, like when the kettle boils and there’s only one cup to fill.
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5–8 minutes
The life that was waiting
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1–2 minutes
Healing doesn’t look like anything
I kept waiting for the moment I would feel better. It never arrived as a moment. It arrived as a Tuesday, and then another Tuesday, and then a walk in the rain.
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1–2 minutes
What I learned about worth from a dog who didn’t know the word
She never asked me to earn it. The warmth of her, the absolute certainty of her presence — none of it asked anything of me except that I be there.
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3–4 minutes
On asking for help (A thing I learned from a dog who has no shame about it)
Daisy asks for what she needs without apology. She is hungry, she tells me. She is lonely, she tells me. She is frightened, she tells me. I have been trying to learn this for forty-eight years.
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3–4 minutes
The self I lost and the one I found
I had been performing myself for so long that I had forgotten what the original looked like…or that there had ever been an original underneath the performance at all. Daisy seemed to know, though. She’d look at me the way you look at a door you’re expecting someone to come through, glancing up, waiting for…
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1–2 minutes
The weight of being chosen
She chose me before I knew how to choose myself. There is something undoing about being loved by a creature who has no reason to lie.