Mother Emily

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As I head down the straightaway of my last trimester, those around me expect that anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed by motherhood will set in. I don’t just mean people around me, but every mommy blog, book, and spammy email mentions this anxiety that must just be eating me up.

I don’t feel it. Continue reading

anxiety attacks and the fallacy of linear progression

IMG_0913Exactly a year ago, up here in the mountains, I fell upon reading Katharine Welby’s blog, and began to admit to myself that I wasn’t “just blue” or “tired” or “having a tough week”–I was depressed.

Katharine Welby-Roberts had been suffering anxiety and depression for many years, and wrote with such clarity and compassion that I was both horrified (at how much I identified with her experiences) and comforted (there was actually something wrong, but it was something at least somewhat treatable which I was suffering, and which millions of others suffered too).

In the ensuing year, as has been cataloged in this very space, I’ve started medication, sought healing through less work and more prayer and yoga, and continue to pursue honesty along the path I trod.

So, a year out, I had my first anxiety attack in several weeks just yesterday. Continue reading

A Christmas Eve Rant

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(you’ve been warned)

Yesterday on the way to work, listening to NPR, as I’m wont to do, I heard a story from thetakeaway.org that left me hopping mad.

It is a story entitled, “A Christmas Treasure Buried for a Century,” and detailed a discovery which a modern apartment-dweller in New York City made, and the response he had to this unearthed treasure.

Continue reading