takowrites...sometimes

A Collection of Miscellaneous Thoughts A s I grow older, I struggle not to fall into the doom and gloom of the twenties. Life comes at you fast, and I find myself internally retreating to when I was 4, pigtails and butterfly clips, and my parents got me a cake big enough for my full name to be written on it. I find myself wanting to relive my life, and I have to tell myself to simply allow myself to exist . It is essential to practice slowing down, hitting the brakes, and allowing yourself to take a break: to be here, and not there, in some other place, some distant land, some imagined future. As my friend Claudia wrote in her recent blog article, “Sometimes life is quite simple.” It is essential to take a few steps back, and see things with the simplicity of a child. Rediscover the world and my place in it. How can I be good to other people? How can I be good to myself? Often when I try to navigate my adult life, I try to imagine myself as being the guardian of my younger self...

The Art of Mothering Men I often wonder why breakups seem to be much harder on women than on men (most of the time.) After a breakup, it's commonplace to hear a woman speak of ‘finding herself’ but it is rare to hear of men embarking on these elaborate spiritual and emotional journeys, to find themselves again, to learn self-love, to learn their value outside of romance. There is this common phenomenon in women that I will call ‘wife-ication.’ I would describe this as the gradual loss of self, and the phase when one makes their male partner quite literally their entire world. It begins like this: You’ve gone out to the club, it’s girls’ night and everyone is having a blast. Your friend’s phone rings, it’s her man and he wants to see her. Goodbyes are said and she leaves to be with her man. Over time you hardly ever see this friend, she is always with her man, but funnily enough, he isn’t always with her. He still hangs out with his friends and maintains a healthy social life....