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There is no universe in which I wish I'd made a different choice than to have Zoe << FULL STOP>> ...but I do not love parenting. She is an amazing, brilliant, clever, kind person who absolutely needs and deserves to be here, but I do not come easily to parenting. I am grateful every day that Zoe chose me to be her mom, and am blessed by her existence, but I often resent the requirements of parenting. To me, parenting is exhausting, boring, stressful, and frankly mostly sucks.

REMINDER: the stuff that happens to you in the first five years of your life builds the foundation for your adult self. It may all be preconscious (meaning you don't remember it) but it all forms you. This includes attachment to primary caregivers, and whether that attachment is secure or insecure.

Reminder: it is hard to hold yourself to high standards that align with your stated values. It is particularly hard to hold yourself to them when you are hurt, scared, or depleted in some way. Petty grievances feel sooooo satisfying to poke at sometimes. Sometimes dropping into our worst versions is the easiest and most appealing option.

Reminder: everyone needs and deserves privacy. This includes your partner and your children.

So much of my career has been providing "permission" for people to do what they already want to do...

Look, there is no way to cheat ethically or to minimize the damage cheating causes to the trust in your relationship. I think sometimes people think that cheating "quietly" is like, an okay thing to do because it doesn't REALLY cause harm...

Reminder: We never have the full perspective on anything or anyone. (Including ourselves, honestly, because shadows tend to obscure the shit we don't want to see, but we at least have greater ACCESS to ourselves in theory...) But when we observe others, there are always missing pieces of information. So to draw a conclusion on a situation or person and then act as though our conclusion is somehow correct despite our limited viewpoint is irrational at best, and potentially har

In my personal and professional life, I have come across so many men who are wounded in very specific ways...

I'll be blunt: y'all already suck at communication. Why would you make it harder on yourself? As someone who has literally built my career on teaching people how to communicate in healthy, pro-social ways, I promise you cannot afford to atrophy those muscles any further.

A tip for women who date men: in my opinion, it is a huge red flag if a man does not have any female friends. Why? Because a man who does not have any female friends does not actually like women.

I recently read a statistic that roughly half of all adults have insecure attachment. So we start out FROM CHILDHOOD being pre-wired for struggle in relationships in part because our parents/primary caregivers and their parents/primary caregivers (etc) were also wired for struggle and failed to sufficiently meet our needs for attunement.

I love that she knows me well enough to know what to expect from me like this, too. Sure, it makes me easily manipulated by her feelings, but I'd rather be overly attuned than oblivious to them. Zoe's secure attachment to both of us and deep sense of safety in our family makes me feel so proud. (Secondary benefit: I heal my own inner child through parenting her.)

Reminder: most people in the world are just out here doing shit without thinking too much about it or how it might affect others.

ANNUAL REMINDER: When people say they're "sarcastic" they usually THINK they're talking about being sort of snarky-funny, maybe in a dark way. But first of all, negativity isn't super funny. It's honestly an energy suck.

A practice I use in all of my relationships - intimate, personal, professional, etc- is to OVER communicate and OVER inform so that I reduce the risk of misunderstanding as much as I can...

I do not practice punishment. Full stop. And furthermore, I do not believe punishment has a place in healthy relational dynamics, nor does it improve anyone's behavior intrinsically...

Reminder: Struggle love is not the thing, y'all. It doesn't have to be like that. People invest a certain amount of time in a relationship and/or experience a certain pleasurable feeling that they haven't found elsewhere yet, and they become unreasonably certain that everything that happens in the service of this relationship is "worth it."

The topic is whether women are actually more emotional -overall- than men. I submit that they are not. Here is my evidence:

So much of what we do is compulsory and not aligned for who you actually are as a human being and your unique way of existing. In order to find peace and joy in life, you may have to do shit way differently than how you're expected to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief lately. A dear friend recently lost her father unexpectedly and is understandably having a difficult time coping with the loss. And I find myself not having any helpful words to offer that don’t sound like trite cliches or platitudes.