A selfie we took on a recent outing A little less than a year ago, a friend and I sat over coffee to catch up on our lives. I asked about the new woman she was seeing. Her eyes grew wide and she whispered, “Tracie, I don’t understand it.” Her voice was quiet, but full of incredulity, “she’s really into me, and I haven’t even made her come, yet!” My heart broke a little that my friend thought so poorly of herself she was confused when someone liked her outside of sexual grati

“ “I’m sorry there are no make-up days available.” The text from my friend referred to a specific event that had to be cancelled with no chance of rescheduling, but the phrase resonated with something much deeper. It was two weeks after my 50th birthday, and it seemed “there are no make up days,” was a motto for my second half century. “That’s it exactly,” I texted back, “Life is short and there are no make-up days.” Over the coming days and weeks, I became a broken record,

My dog Sadie rested on the floor while I read. I looked down at her when she audibly farted. Startled, she eyed her own rear with some consternation. I chuckled and went back to my reading. A few minutes later, it happened again, with the same startled reaction from the dog. When it happened a third time, Sadie stood, walked to a different spot in the room, and re-settled herself there, as if her dog bed were the cause of her surprising tushy noises. I laughed out loud and te

“I would rather lick a cactus.” I actually said that to someone who I hired to be my coach. It was a small-group mentorship program to teach podcasters how to monetize their shows. I had already been feeling a bit of a mismatch in the program, but when I made my cactus pronouncement, I felt a sense of being trapped. From the front of the Zoom room I was being told that hustling was my only option. “Maybe part of my problem is that I also have a full time job,” I suggested al

I sometimes tell myself stories from a biography of me entitled Very Good But Not Good Enough . This many-chaptered tome is filled with half-truths and lies. However, when I pull it off the shelf and let it fall open in my lap, they appear 100% accurate. One 25-year-old chapter makes clear I am not worth a lot of effort, and purports to have been written by my grad school boyfriend. A convoluted yet boring chapter conveys the story of my being the only qualified candidate an

Listen to this essay, as read by the author. I cross paths with a poem. “Tree,” by Jane Hirschfield, ends with the line “Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.” This sentence catches in my throat. My shoulders hunch. I am not sure why I feel tears welling. I reread the words. “Immensity taps at your life.” Immensity is the universe. Tap tap. Immensity is God. Tap. Immensity is all the things I am supposed to be doing with my life, this one life, that I’m not doing. Tap

Listen to this post: I don’t remember doing it, but I chose the Wranglers. My mom told the story regularly: “You wanted Jordache jeans, but they were $30 a pair. Wranglers were only 10, so I told you you could have Jordache, but we could only afford one pair. But if you got the Wranglers, you could have three.” The shopping trip was the new-clothes outing for second grade. It was 1983. The year before, my parents were still together, and Mom “didn’t worry about money as muc

A friend recently recommended I read God is Here: Reimagining the Divine by Rabbi Toba Spitzer. It was a gift. Truly. Rabbi Spitzer provides beautiful, rich metaphors for the divine. Images that don’t chafe the way the God is a giant sky-man does. Things like God is water; God is fire; God is a whisper; God is a place; God is a cloud etc. I loved trying on the different metaphors with Rabbi Spitzer and testing how they feel with my experience of the divine. Even before those

Today would have been my father’s 73rd birthday. I say would have been, because he left us ten years and two weeks ago. My relationship with my dad wasn’t always an easy one. I think he never quite knew the right way to interact with adolescent and then adult daughters. Also, he often defended his wife who emotionally abused me for much of my life. That’s the kind of thing that can get in the way of a parent-child relationship, even when the child is 37. Even still, he was th

“Really?!?” She turns to me in incredulity. I have just said that I am afraid of sparring. I am an interloper. A yellow belt among black. “But it’s a game,” the 6th-degree black belt assures me, “it’s like a game.” “Okay. It’s a game that scares me,” I smile at her. From across the table my Sensei informs me that from his experience, I have a better chance being injured playing little league baseball than in the dojo. I refrain from telling him I am equally scared of playing