Personal Essays

  • Publishing and Catastrophizing

    I was lying in bed the other night, doing the thing I do best when I should be sleeping: catastrophizing. Actually, I was getting a lecture from my inner critic. She’s tall, blonde, and attractive in that way that automatically qualifies someone to be a meteorologist on a morning show. She taps long, fake, blingy nails on a phone better than mine, guzzles Red Bull, calls kale smoothies “meals,” and has never had a thought she didn’t share. She wears jeans bedazzled with judgments too cruel to make it into a burn book, and the back pockets are stuffed with internalized misogyny. Worst of all, she can initiate a Zoom…

  • Low Altitude Turbulence

    Yesterday, I ran an errand on my lunch break. I walked out of a store in Sugarhouse (a neighborhood here in Salt Lake City) and stopped short. Right in front of the sliding glass doors of the Nordstrom Rack, the chassis of a Honda Pilot was balanced on a large boulder with three of the SUV’s wheels off the ground. I stared at it for a beat, trying to understand what I was looking at. I must have just missed the cool stunt, because I could hear the man in the driver’s seat (way up in the air!) talking to roadside assistance. Because, for real. No getting out of that…