This winter felt long and felt short. The first days of warm weather always catch me by surprise; I can’t get used to not wearing a coat and gloves all the time. Nissan comes from the word nitzan, bud. Spring is a time of gentle renewal and fresh beginnings, warm sunshine, and green grass. It’s a time that will …
Since elective egg freezing has mainstreamed relatively recently (in the past ten years or so), it’s understandable that many people feel unclear about and uncomfortable with this concept. Recently, I’ve heard people share things they believe or have heard about egg freezing that were simply inaccurate, and I wanted to clear up some misconceptions.
The other night I was skimming through old posts and getting a warm and fuzzy feeling, saying hi to past versions of myself preserved as emotional snapshots. I also noticed that my blog has evolved in surprising (to me) ways. When I started this blog, my mission was to uplift and encourage other single ladies (I was 24 at the …
A few months ago, the 18Forty podcast and website did a series on dating and marriage in the frum community. At the time, I thought, wow, this is incredibly validating stuff, but touching on a part of me too raw to engage with right now. But some time has passed, and I don’t want to not link it here because …
A friend and I were talking about how similarly we feel about certain experiences in shidduchim (what makes us feel stressed, pressured, or judged), and how we have found that other people feel differently. This reminded me of one of Gretchen Rubin’s Secrets of Adulthood: We are mostly alike, but our differences are very important. I also thought about …
It comes so much easier for me to be hopeful on other people’s behalf than for myself. When I’m feeling the pain, I can’t see my way out of the pain. But when I look at other people in their situations, it is easy for me to believe that it is easy for Hashem to help them. So maybe I’ll …
A few days ago I journaled a list of hobbies I would take up if I had the time – some of these are a bit aspirational but that’s the fun of journaling:
A line from a poem in The Mother in Our Lives stayed with me: “Let my heart be my womb.” –from “A Childless Woman’s Song of Transcendence” by Bayla Berger
I enjoyed this essay by Alexandra Fleksher on the issue of materialism in the frum community. It was published Chanukah time but is relevant any time of year.
For a homework assignment in my therapeutic writing training, I had to summarize a study supporting the use of expressive writing for a specific issue. Since I am interested in how to use journaling to deal with burnout in shidduchim, I used an article on workplace burnout as a starting point. The writing protocol in the study required participants to …
