The amazing thing about love and attention and encouragement and grace and success and joy is that these things are infinite. We get a new supply every single morning, and so we can give it away all day. We never, ever have to monitor the supply of others or grab or hoard.
The hardest part of living without social media was remembering that my little life was enough, so I could just stay there and live it without asking for anyone else’s permission or validation. I realized that for me, posting is like asking the world, ‘Do you ‘like’ me?’
I just think that if we are going to call ourselves pro-life, we must also agree that starvation and poverty and disease and immigration and health care for all and war and peace and the environment are also pro-life issues.
It is suggested to us a million times a day that our bodies are projects. They aren’t. Our lives are. Our spirituality is. Our relationships are. Our work is.
I’m not big on faith rules, but if I had to choose one, it would be that every person must choose a faith issue upon which to hang her hat that requires her to change – not somebody else.
We should live out our particular brand of faith, sure – but we should never force our brand of faith upon anyone else. All violence starts with the desire to change others and then never, ever ends.
Over time, I have come to believe that ‘brave’ does not mean what we think it does. It does not mean ‘being afraid and doing it anyway.’ Nope. Brave means listening to the still small voice inside and doing as it says. Regardless of what the rest of the world is saying.
To me, full-time mothering felt like way too much and yet not nearly enough. Lost in a landslide of diapers, birthday parties, and others’ needs, I ached to reestablish myself.
When I was detoxing from social media, I realized that I was thinking in status updates. It seemed I had trained my brain to translate everything I experienced throughout the day into 140 characters or less.
I think that in order to parent effectively, we are going to have to admit two things: We can’t keep our children safe. We can’t accept the fact that we can’t keep our children safe.
Sometimes the rewards of risk don’t leave us wrecked. Sometimes we find our passion, our purpose, courage, connection, and comfort. Every good thing in our lives is a direct result of risk.
We’re told that to be successful girls, we have to be small and quiet. Yet to be successful humans, we have to become big and have a voice. There’s an inherent contradiction.
