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Stranger Things Have Happened
I love meeting people I have very little chance of seeing again. The kind of people you meet on your last day of college, or in a grocery store on the other side of town, or at a bike repair shop the day you sell your bike. It’s not that I enjoy that I might never see them again; in fact, I most often wish the opposite were true. But there’s something about meeting someone when there is no risk involved. You can laugh a bit too loudly, listen more than you’d usually care to, make a joke your friends wouldn’t have laughed at. I could have said no when…
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Baggage Limit
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Making Space
There are many things that every tired-eyed, graciously patient kindergarten teacher finds frustrating. Teaching freshly five-year-olds to sit quietly in their chairs, unwrapping a million granola bars and fruit gummies– the list could go on and on. But one thing that never ceases to bring a kindergarten teacher to the brink of tearing out their hair is the chore of getting a class of twenty-something kindergarteners to form a line. The problem* isn’t that they don’t know how to do it, or what their behavior should look like while in line (*note: this is actually very often a problem). The problem is that kindergarteners don’t know how to make space. …
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Welcome to My Jo March Era
Welcome, dear readers, to Overthinking Like a Girl (appropriately named after something I have gotten really good at). As a life-long self-proclaimed Meg March, I have officially decided to enter my Jo March era. Thus, I adopted a dog, named him Theodore Laurence, and started a blog. After years of lying to myself, it is time to recognize that I was not born to yearn for nice dresses and marry young (why, God, why??). I was born to have commitment issues, a short temper, and dammit, I was born to write.
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Falling in Love with February
February has been my least favorite month for as long as I can remember. I can look back on my life and point out a million bad things that have happened on chilly February days. At the dawn of February 1st every year, I wake with a sinking feeling in my stomach and an impending sense of doom. By my early twenties, I found myself completely cynical of the entire idea of Valentine’s Day– and not just the romantic part of it. I wanted nothing to do with the hearts, the candy, the pink and red signs. It was all a gimmick to get people into candle-lit restaurants on a…
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Baggage Limit
At the airport, I’m constantly checking to make sure I have all my luggage with me. I’ve been known to push my way to the front of the baggage claim carousel to make sure I get to lay eyes on my bag first. The thought of leaving the airport without all my baggage is simply intolerable. And yet, every trip, I fall into the trap of believing that my physical luggage is the only baggage I will take with me. Maybe- just maybe- nothing else will follow me from home. None of my anxieties, my problems, the things I have to deal with.
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Stranger Things Have Happened
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Rituals
When I was fourteen, my grandmother made all the girls in our family get dressed up and attend a high tea. We squeezed into some random lady’s tea room in the suburbs of Illinois and wore oversized hats the shop owner provided. My grandmother oversaw the menu and frowned in disapproval when the hostess put her own spin on the classic high tea dishes. It was two hours of pouring tea from mismatched pots and talking about whether we liked our scones with or without clotted cream. It was long, it was tedious, and it was the most incredible thing I had ever experienced. My grandmother- along with the entire…
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I Dare You
When I was younger, I learned that I could self-motivate by daring myself to do hard things. Extra credit assignment that I did not need to do and did not have time for? I dare you to do it anyways. Scared to send a risky text to a boy who was not worth my time? I dare you to send it. At the time, I was proud of myself for finding a way to get myself to do hard things. How entrepreneurial-girl-boss of me to suffer through anything I set my mind to! (This was, in fact, a major indicator of a mental disorder- but that’s a topic for another…
