There’s a poignant scene in the Barbie movie when Margot Robbie’s character, Barbie, sits on a bench next to an older woman. Barbie is dejected, crying, her shiny blonde bubble having been burst by existential wonderings, which neither her Dream House, her Ken, or her coif can nullify. The older woman beside Barbie exudes the confidence of vulnerability, experience, and age. The beauty of her humanity is so striking to Barbie that she tells the ...

There's a print hanging in my house of rows and rows of colored dots, each one captioned with a tongue-in-cheek moniker. Were I to count, I'm betting each color is represented in equal numbers. But sometimes, I'll look at that print and a red dot will catch my eye. I'll read the name, something like picnic tablecloth, or Maine lobster, or Tide detergent, and relish the wit of it. When my gaze zooms out, all ...

  It feels cliche to talk about rising. The image of the phoenix is played out. We get it. We fall and (hopefully) we get back up. Hurrah. Except anyone who has truly felt themselves rise understands the hype. I’m a perfectionist, which means I’m perpetually aiming at doing things beyond even the best of my abilities. In striving, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. I realized a while ago how pointless (and damaging) ...

A woman named Lolita stood over me, saying a prayer to the spirits of the North, East, West, and South. She made shushing sounds, and waved her hands in the air above my body, apparently pulling negative energy out of my system. “Do you feel a heaviness traveling through your legs and out of your feet?” She asked at the end of the treatment. Maybe? I wanted to. My sister had left her shamanic healing ...

  “I just had to send you a message,” a client we’ll call Marla wrote to me. “Normally this time of year I’d be feening to shop for myself and other people. Like I had to stay plugged so that I wouldn’t miss major sale announcements, but instead I feel totally unbothered!” We’d worked with Marla extensively to edit her space. We talked at length about how she used every excuse in the book to ...