A Letter To Myself in 2019: Of Course You’re A Racist
Hey there. It’s me, Lael. I’m writing to you from December 2020 to prime the pump for where you’ll be headed in the next year. This is the letter I wish someone had given me a year ago. I think it might have helped on all those dark nights of …
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Daily Verse 11.19.20—No More Cruise Control
I feel unusually strong about not using the cruise control function while driving a car, and it’s a big bone of contention in our family. I don’t get it and no one gets me. I get the logic and the rationale behind it—how it is more fuel-efficient and ensures you’re …
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Daily Verse 11.17.20—Always Do Your Best Is Bullshit
I caught myself in a whopper of a lie to my kids not too long ago, and it resulted in me taking a good dose of my own medicine. In our house, we talk a lot about not “mailing it in” when it comes to showing up to our responsibilities …
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Daily Verse 11.15.20—Things I Didn’t Know
It’s true what they say, I think, about the longer you live, the more you realize you don’t know. I wouldn’t have believed that in my 20s. But then again, I thought I knew everything back then. There is a certain humility that comes with age that I have found …
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Daily Verse 11.10.20—Alone, But Not Lonely
I have this practice of taking myself away two or three times a year. My intention is always the same: to remove all the distractions of my familiar space, enough so I can hear the quiet, deep, and true voice that lives inside me. Why? Because ironically, it’s only when …
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Daily Verse 11.4.20: Just Keep Swimming
I cannot tell you how much inspiration I have gotten from that little blue angelfish, Dory, in the movie Finding Nemo. Remember her? She was a kind and beautiful spirit inside a fish’s body and had the unfortunate (or was it her saving grace?) affliction of having no short-term memory. …
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Daily Verse 11.1.20: Captain’s Log
There is this scene from the movie The Dead Poet Society that haunts me. It’s where Robin Williams, an irreverent and heretical new teacher at this traditional boarding school, gathers his students around him in class one day (“huddle up!”) and quotes a couple of lines from Walt Whitman’s poem …
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Getting Naked With My Truth
There are days I am convinced my entire life is strung together with a series of movie clips and soundtracks—connecting the bits of insights and moments of clarity in such a way that they literally reveal the breadcrumbs that have moved me forward. That was the case the other morning …
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The Pattern Of Questions
I don’t know what magic lives in a bathroom, but whenever I’m in the shower I start writing in my head and have my absolute best insights. And whenever I’m going throughout my day with my hair on fire, sometimes the only moment I get to stop — and be …
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Pebbles In My Shoe
Someone once wrote about me in an interview, observing that “it seems she never stops thinking, considering, fitting pieces together.” That woman got me, she did. She described how I move (“she talks with her hands and her arms, radiating exuberance…”) and didn’t seem surprised to learn that I was …
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