It’s been a week since my son Nick married his true love, and I’m still catching myself crying over things that have nothing to do with the wedding: an irritating driver, a task that’s harder than it needs to be, a random memory that surfaces while I’m folding laundry. I…

I say it that way on purpose. Not “today is my daughter’s birthday.” I think it is. When we traveled to Russia to meet her, the paperwork gave us some numbers, but we didn’t know whether they’d been translated from the traditional European date format to the American one, and…

Six months into asking how can this be easy, I found out where that question actually comes from In December, I wrote about the phrase I was taking into 2026: How can this be easy? I borrowed it from my business coach Krista Smith, and I loved it immediately. Not because I was…

I’m learning to have the courage to say I have enough information to move forward. It sounds simple. It’s not, at least not for me. I can geek out on analytics related to my business (an artifact of tracking diabetes-related data since I was 10). Weekly data reviews, tracking what…

Freshman year, 1985. San Marcos High School newspaper. That’s me in the polka dots, interviewing President Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes. I was terrified. It was the nicest outfit I could pull together at the moment, and maybe it matched exactly how unprepared I felt. Fourteen years old, holding a…

I’ve been thinking about fear a lot lately. My own, mostly. The kind that shows up when you’re doing something new — stepping into work that feels bigger, or different, or more visible than what you’ve done before. The kind that keeps asking: what if this doesn’t work? And I’ve been…

I just got back from an epic trip to Central Europe with my husband, including a Danube River Cruise from Budapest to Prague — and I packed a carry-on. That’s it. I am a minimalist packer by conviction and also by stubbornness. I know what I need. I know what…

Portrait mode: on You know that photo someone else takes of you at a party, the one taken with no warning, a bad angle, and zero filter? Contrast that with the one you took yourself with the right light and 37 retakes? Perfectionism is the gap between those two photos.…

One feeling keeps coming up for so many women I know, and I’ve felt it myself: behind. Not behind in a dramatic way. Behind in the circumspect, capable-woman way. Behind on the timeline. Behind on what life is “supposed” to look like by now. The Script I Was Following For…