Have you ever tried this fun writing exercise? A six word memoir tells a story or expresses an idea in exactly six words. It’s so satisfying — the constraints really stimulate your creativity. Recently, I used this prompt in a writing group, and I’m thinking of some of my own. Here are a few:
A friend and I were talking about a struggle we grappled with when our younger sisters got engaged. The brain is a pattern-finding machine. It always wants to find a reason for why things happen. So when you fully expected to be the one to get engaged first, your brain wants to know why you weren’t. And it starts to …
I hadn’t been following the Mishpacha serial Stand By, but this Shabbos I picked up a back-issue Family First and read Miriam Pascal Cohen’s follow-up piece, about the way our community views single women. Did you read it? I find it sooo satisfying and validating when women share their experiences without mincing words. Some of the issues pointedly addressed in …
One of the things I miss most about living in my apartment is making and hosting Shabbos meals. I daydream about getting my own place — I’ve put out feelers but a comfortable and affordable rental is hard to find! I love to plan the gatherings I’d host (will host!) in an apartment of my own. I like the idea …
I read this great article in The New Yorker about travel and I kept thinking, yes! I totally agree! I had actually just been thinking about travel. I’m 31, and planning my third trip to Europe. I went to Italy at 22 (so yooooung), Spain at 25, and now be”H Austria at 31. Meanwhile many people my age have been …
Hello, all. I’d love if you could share some of your favorite posts with a friend or three. I so enjoy writing and pushing out lots of hopefully good, helpful stuff into the world, but it would mean a lot to me if it reached more people. If you can take the time to share links with your friend groups …
This post has been in the works forever. I’ve written about other hard stuff — rejection, loneliness, and ambiguous loss — but not enough about heartbreak. I have to admit that before I experienced heartbreak, it seemed mysterious and romantic to me: imagine having had a relationship that was “real” enough to matter when it ended.
Something undeniable: I find it easier to read secular books/articles about dating and being single than I do anything frum on the same topics. It’s like a sensitivity I’ve developed over the past few years; shidduchim-talk pushes my buttons. Instead, more generic encouragement and advice is easier to integrate and helps me feel supported. I’m not sure why this is, …
Gretchen Rubin shared a writing exercise to capture a person or place, called the Five-Senses Portrait. For each of the five senses (hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching), you write a list of five associations to create a sensory snapshot of that person or place. I decided to write a five-senses portrait for my childhood summer spot, but once I got …
Hey, all. At the beginning of the calendar year, I wrote a list of — not goals, exactly; more like to-do items that I wanted to keep on my radar. Now that we are at the halfway point of the year, I’m taking inventory of what has and has not happened so far:
