it's hard sometimes loving you when i don't know how i'll be loved when i arrive home or when i wake with the sun rise you're like the moon sometimes full burning, intense, golden sometimes cold a sliver of light barely visible in a darkened sky i can see you even when the night comes but can you see me? i'm here waving you down standing on the mountain top taking you in but you don't see me did you even look? i used to believe i wasn't worthy of love i didn't think someone c

He told me he could picture us getting married one day. He brushed his beard against the side of my face, his wet lips grazing my ear, and he smiled as he said it. We were sitting intertwined on his black leather couch after we got home from a friend’s birthday party. He had drank quite a bit throughout the night - a few Johnnie Walker Black’s neat. I could tell he was feeling more relaxed and happier than usual. I laughed it off and didn’t take it too seriously. We had been

I've written a lot about the topic of trust in the past and how trusting people was often really hard for me to do. I've shared with you personal stories of having faith in past romantic relationships to eventually find out that the person I believed in didn't have my best interest at heart. The last time I wrote about those experiences was two years ago, around the time I had taken a hiatus from writing for Struck Inside Out. I've had two full years of reflection, stretching

I used to think I was alone and crazy in how I felt in my former love relationships. The conversations that my mind would often have with itself were both borderline psychotic and what I thought to be at the time, abnormal. That is until I spoke to other women who not only confessed to feeling the same way as I did, but actually wanted to speak more about the mystery of the “crazy girl” mentality. What is the “crazy girl” mentality you may ask? It is when a woman, while datin

“So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?” -Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Y

Love has always taken the spotlight of my life. Whether blissfully in love or desperately heartbroken, it has always commanded and depleted me. I hate to admit it, but there have been far too many times where I’ve let myself become devoured by love’s uncertainty to the point where I’d be paralyzed from it. If I had gotten into a really bad argument with a boyfriend, if I felt something was questionably off between us or if there was a lingering distance growing, I’d become na

I’ve asked myself so many times in my life, When are you finally going to stop this already? How many more times do you have to experience this to realize something needs to change? Have you done that before? You find yourself repeating the same old detrimental habits, attracting the same old types of relationships, living out the same old script that’s been rewritten numerous times with new people, places and things, but still the same old plot? Oh, and the leading character

“I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.” –William Landay Last January I posted a letter I wrote to my Grandfather that I read at his wake. It was about his life – his small mannerisms of drinking tea with lemon in the mornings, reading the pape

Have you ever had a gut feeling that was so incredibly strong and over powering that you simply could just not deny it? Whether your intuition was telling you something you wanted to hear or not, you had no choice but to obey and carefully listen to the little clues it was whispering to you. Sometimes when we’re getting these hints, we don’t want to believe what our voice is telling us, because if it were in fact true, then everything that we once believed in would be a lie.

What is that saying again about taking risks? “Leap and the net will find you”? Or was it, “All growth is a leap in the dark”? Either way, the both are synonymous - take a chance on something new and everything will eventually fall into place. Every new beginning is like a blank page, an empty canvas and a new start. That’s where we believe the darkness to be; in the center of that ambiguous uncertainty that lies in the pit of our stomachs at the dawn of each new venture. I t

Lately I have begun the practice of asking myself: “Are you doing this because you want to do this or because you have to?” It’s become a sort of call to action for me, to see in what areas of my life I am merely going through the motions or actively participating in my present life circumstances. Of course, a part of this life is doing things we don’t necessarily want to do – things we have to do in order to get by. The kind of means to an end job that supports you financial

Have you ever written a letter to an old boyfriend, articulating things that were left unsaid, writing for a sense of closure, only to leave it unsent? I’ve done that twice in my life and both times I thought I was completely over my ex. I was happy to finally feel unattached and independent, only to soon hear a song that reminded me of him or to unexpectedly stumble across an old photo of us, causing my heart to drop into my stomach and knots to fill the void. Alanis Moriset

“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.” –Stephen King I’ve been thinking a lot lately about living in the present moment. I guess I’ve