It’s not that everyone is someone important at IKAR, my synagogue; it’s that everyone is someone. At the end of February, I showed up for Shabbat services, mostly because honoring our friends’ fiftieth anniversary was important to me, even though …

Going to shul Read more »

The first group I belonged to, my family, taught me how unsafe they were and I’ve performed poorly in groups ever since, unless I’m leading them. Even then, I stifle so much fear. This has been true my whole life. …

Exceptions Read more »

It wasn’t that I had no compassion for the DID individual on the stage at the local grassroots mental health support presentation. He was incoherent and dissociating, true. He was no spokesman for healing or for integration, true. In fact, …

Grassroots Read more »

I think of all the defensive layers of protective armor I’ve contrived over the years, some of them quite ingenious, some of them as banal as antibiotics and cortisone cream, the bacterial warriors of someone who has forsaken her larger …

Stinger Read more »

My father listed the address of every house where he ever lived. He listed every company he ever worked for. He listed his religious affiliations, his schools, and his absence of anything else to list. He listed his life in …

Shift Read more »

“I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling, though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I …

Fundamentally Read more »