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This is Between Business Cards
I’m navigating life—one foot stuck in the mud, the other trying to pull free. Like you, I’ve held a lot of roles: sibling, employee, spouse, healthy person and one facing illness. Some of those titles even made it onto my business cards. But life has a way of editing our identities—whether we’re ready or not. Over time, my roles changed. I was divorced. My parents passed. I experienced painful estrangements and major illness. And through it all—showing up, struggling, transitioning—I found unexpected lifelines: family, friends, books, projects and small, quiet gestures that kept me afloat. This isn’t a self-help blog. It’s more of a help-yourself-while-I-stumble-through blog. It’s about the collective…
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A Cat Tale
I was six the first time I hurt something I loved. Growing up on a farm, my sister Valarie and I played with Barbies. But our best friends were chicks and calves, puppies and kittens. Each had a name. “Don’t treat the animals like toys,” Mom called to us while hanging wet laundry on a fraying white clothesline. “We won’t, Mommy,” I answered, my arms full of six-week-old kittens. A spring breeze carried the musky scent of cow droppings and freshly mown grass. Dresses, hung by their hems, flapped in the wind as though trying to fly away. Chickens pecked at the ground near my mother, contentedly clucking as they…
