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Wyn is Live!

It is with great delight that I announce and present the first issue of a new online publication.From the About page:

Wyn is an online magazine focused on providing resources and hope for mental and emotional healing. Each month’s issue has a specific theme that runs through all the articles. Articles and columns are published every-other-day or so throughout the month. To receive one email a week with the latest stories and news, sign up for the Wyn Weekly Newsletter in the upper right corner of the site.

The name Wyn is from the Old English rune that later became “w.” The word “wyn” means “joy/delight/pleasure” in Old English. The goal of Wyn Magazine is to help bring joy to women who have lost hope.

After Managing Editor Becky Castle Miller and Associate Editor Amy Jane Helmericks went through different experiences with depression, they talked about the resources they wished they’d had for themselves…and decided to create those for other women. The idea (and name) for Wyn came together in December 2011, starting a two-year project assembling a global team of writers, designers, and photographers. Wyn officially launched in June 2013.

Becky emailed me with great intensity (if you can accept that as a combination) toward the end of November 2011. Four hours ahead on the East Coast, she wanted to set up a mutually kidless time to talk about an idea.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m all about talking ideas, but we’re talking the end of November (days away from my third win in NaNoWriMo). I hesitated just enough for her to remember my near-goal and reschedule for December 1.

During that phone conversation we entered into hope and delight and concrete planning that tied to our strengths in a way that the world of dirty dishes and dirty diapers just couldn’t touch.

I don’t know about Becky, but for me the fit and the energy seemed too deep to be real. But there’s something true about speaking reality into life.

Becky and I talked about creation and consistency and content and sparked this hunger that we might have an opportunity to spare other women the confusion and isolation we experienced as we struggled for language and right-response to this unfamiliar entity called depression.

Becky’s years of traveling as a military kid and facility on the internet made her the hub of our writing and photography pool. My intensity, love for words, and impulse for instant-feedback (or maybe Becky can say the real reasons?) combined with hers to move us forward.

All the delight and hope-of-purpose suggested by our initial conversation has persisted. There is something ineffably rich about participating in a project so perfectly aligned with one’s natural gifts and natural brokenness.

I am still “in recovery” from/with my depression, sometimes still living ‘one day at a time.’

Holding out a hand provides me a sense of grounding, both to my past-that-is-past and the now-that-is-now.

That last sentence will make the most sense when you read this month’s closing article about Re-triggering.

Much of my growth has been discovering and entering into my strengths, even while I learn how to compensate for (or even accept) my weaknesses.

My blog-site, for example, has become my writing-business website (more on the business in future) and my kids are learning how to participate in more of the home & farm maintenance.

Anymore I can’t describe myself as anything but broken, but over and over again I am being reminded that broken is FAR from useless.

How do I Become a Better Writer?

Image courtesy of Sias van Schalkwyk via stock.xchng

That wasn’t exactly the question she asked me.

More it was, “He was awesome. How did that happen?!”

I didn’t really have time to research an answer, and part of me felt, Hey, I‘m not a teacher, how do I know?

But thankfully I was stopped by a phrase that popped instantly into my head.

Tonguepolishing.

Or should that be two words?

Tongue Polished.

The designation refers to old, old stories that are elegant in their simplicity, and may even contain absurdities that are so entrenched that that they are simply accepted without any attempt at explanation.

Folktales. My little corner of enjoyment in the esoteric.

Image courtesy of Ove Tøpfer via stock.xchng

In our own, more prosaic, lives, we still experience the tongue-polished story.  These are the stories that make up the Family Lexicon.

A Lexicon is like a dictionary (a collection of words), but more specialized. Linguistically it’s a catalog of a given language’s words. The way I use it here is just to give a name to that collection every family grows as it creates its own culture with specialized language, stories and lessons learned.

The longer a story’s been around, the longer it’s been told and re-told, the more streamlined it gets. Often it loses some of the random, irrelevant facts. Frequently the teller is no longer recalling the event itself, but rather the best words with which to describe it.

But that’s not the case, at first.

Something happens (Baby born before we get to the hospital!) and you talk about it because it’s extraordinary, an adventure. But what do you tell? what part did you play in the story? What words you use are not usually the main thing you’re focused on. In those first days, you’re only remembering.

It’s at this point you may begin to see there’s more to storytelling– and, therefore, writing– than most of us think about at first.

There are four levels of work involved in writing, and this, I believe, is part of what complicates the process of learning how to write. It’s this 4-step process, unidentified, that I think gets people in trouble.

  1. Image courtesy of D. Sharon Pruitt via stock.xchng

    Idea generation. You have to come up with something to write ABOUT.

  2. Translation from idea into language.
  3. Translation from head-language to language-on-the-page (this essentially means holding onto the words you’ve come up with long enough to get them onto the page).
  4. The physical act of recording the words.

Some people get stuck at step-1, and that has almost the easiest solution. Even if you never know what to write about, you might be awesome once you get started.

If this is you, there are all sorts of books for sale and even free options on the internet to get you started: just Google writing prompts.

For step-2 (image into language), assume that time will be involved. Give yourself permission to make a few running jumps.  Throw some words at the idea (like spaghetti at a wall) and see what sticks. If you’re a natural talker, use that facility with language that you already have. Talk to a friend, talk to yourself or your pet. Talk into a recorder of some kind, and see if you like what it sounds like later.

This is what you do in that early stage of storytelling. You say what you remember. Other people remember it differently, or your listener has a question. The next time you tell the story you shape the transmission differently, based on what you learned from your earlier audiences.

You’re half-way through the process, and it’s something you’ve done all your life!

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Courage– Revisted

Image courtesy of Colin Brough via stock.xchng

It takes one kind of courage to look straight at  your life, compare where you are to where you want to be, and then dive into making your life the one you want to live.

It is another kind of courage (more in line with General Sherman’s definition) that has us look straight at the cost of something, and choose it anyway.

Both have been coming into play in this “year of courage” (as I labeled 2013).

I have had a string of successes and delights this spring.

  1. I adopted a dog that was just what I wanted (still learning how to train him ;])
  2. We had a family vacation in Hawaii that was almost completely stress-free and got me far enough into my novel that the momentum meant something.
  3. I finished my first 10 speeches to achieve my “competent communicator” award in Toastmasters
  4. I finished my novel last week, and am now letting my story-brain rest, working on non-fiction writing instead (blog, WynMag).
  5. I’m wrapping up a last few editing of WynMag projects and the first issue will go live soon. (And I’m ahead on my submissions for the next issue).
  6. I’ve got the children signed up in a homeschooling program for next year (that we will actually start this summer), so that we have more financial flexibility to explore and experiment with curricula to find what will work best for our family.
  7. We’ve sold the rabbits (most of them, anyway), bringing us down to pet-levels.
  8. Our second round of baby goats is due this week (and we know better what to DO this time, so the enjoyment level will be even higher).
  9. The children will complete their first year of “away school” next week, and I won’t have to be the bad-guy, sending them on with empty hopes that people might change, and the slightly less-empty hope that there’s not many days left.

Image courtesy of Helene Souza via stock.xchng

These are all tied, in my mind, to the first type of courage.

Now comes the second kind.

In the process of getting healthy on a mental/emotional level, I’ve come to recognize a series of needs that I must not just balance or juggle, but meet.

  • Writing
  • Exercise
  • Right eating
  • Sleep

These are the non-negotiable for internal stability.

But having those covered allows me to see there’s a second tier that really enhances the first tier.

  • Clean Space
  • Calm companions
  • Achievable, completable goals
  • Spiritual pursuit (singular)

I suppose having spiritual pursuit in the second category is going to look bad to some people, but it’s true. Until I am stable physically and mentally, asking the hard questions and pushing in any realm that has Deep Meaning is simply asking too much.

One of my biggest problems, all through my mothering journey (I can’t remember much thinking about it before then), was an image of a robot changing its own batteries. That’s how I saw “self-care”.

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Making Characters interesting — Before they do anything.

image courtesy of Sias van Schalkwyk via stock.xchng

Lindorm, Part One, is essentially a Beauty-and-the-Beast story, where the beauty is teenage single mom, and the beast is a dragon.

Short story writer Kurt Vonnegut says that every character needs to want something, “Even if it is only a glass of water.”

In a novel, that wanting, the characters’ goals, usually corresponds to the plot of the book, and those goals are what make the action happen, but in this series of lectures (sorry, I don’t remember which one) the teacher urged pre-existing goals for your characters.

This concept brought a much-needed life into my main characters.

For one thing, pre-existing goals let them be proactive, interesting, believably awesome people before they get yanked into Story-Action. They act instead of (just) reacting.

If the original goals conflict with the (newer, more-compelling/unavoidable) Story-Goals, there’s bonus points in terms of conflict.

My main characters are Linnea (the beauty) and the Lindorm (the beast).

Image courtesy of Lotus Head via stock.xchng

I found this one step– giving them preexisting goals– was huge for giving them depth and dimension.

All of my novels (so far) have been seeded by folk tales, which means I’m starting from archetypes, stereotypes and puppets.  People do things because they DO things. It’s not like they have a motivation all the time.

Now, I am particularly gifted in mind-reading, and I’ve said more than once that my super-power is Instant Extrapolation.

So this starting place really works for me.

I’m not so great at the what-if game out of reality (what if you were investigating a crime and found evidence your daughter might be guilty?), or out of the news (one of James Scott Bell’s suggestions for story mining is taking a headline/newspaper article and milking it 10 different ways). My main problem with this is that they’re all too close to home.

I could really imagine this stuff happening, completely wig myself out, and be useless the next few days till I got over it.

I’m still very tender in the depression department.

I have to be nice to myself, and recognize when to stop pushing or just take another road.

This is where having the solidity of old stories really anchors me.

This is a pattern. This isn’t anything that I could’ve foreseen and prevented, or anything that I made happen with my freakish brain-power.

It’s got magic and crazies and just enough underhanded predictability (GA! I should have known!) that I can just play and enjoy some blatant non-reality.

Continue Reading →

Officially Sick of it {Just give me a day.}

But it’s a celebration, too:

 

Image courtesy of Wong Mei Teng via stock.xchng

The Lindorm Novel is once again making its rounds in the real world of real readers.

How did this finally happen? (You should ask.)

The last time I released LINDORM to betas was June 26, 2010.

(I know because I was so ecstatic about being done I had to try to dig up guilt at having no party ideas for my middle girl’s birthday.)

God provided so perfectly for that event that I felt its success as an extension of His pleasure in me, that I’d persisted in what he designed me to do.

That would be both momming AND writing.

Here was one glorious example of how I didn’t have to do everything, and God supplied for my deficiencies. *happy sigh*

She had a lovely, lovely 6th-birthday party with way more of what she wanted than if I’d put it together.

That was version 8.7.

Yesterday I released version 13.1, one paper copy and three kindle mailings. After Jay converts it to PDF, I have another four friends on the internets who will receive it for review. A couple more friends at church will get paper copies. This is the largest pool of beta readers I’ve yet had, so I’m excited, even though it is unknown how many will actually Finish & Respond.

Jay just started reading it this morning and came running out from wherever he was reading with a rushed, “You ready for feedback?”

And my skin crawled, but I said yes, and he said something really relevant and meaningful (translation: embarrassing to have someone else notice before me), and I reluctantly asked, “Should I correct that before you PDF and print it?”

He instantly went from intense to bland.

“It’s your book. Do whatever you want.”

GRRRR.

This is what I call emotional whiplash.

ETA: Jay clarified later– it wasn’t meant as emotional whiplash. There were more words than just that, and it was him challenging my response: Did I really want to change bits and pieces as feedback came in, or did I want to wait for the weight of everybody and make my decisions/revisions at that point.

It isn’t deadly, but sure as rain & taxes it’s disorienting.

This is what I experience when I get in (say) a stylistic or story-question debate with someone about a movie/book/television show, and it gets a little intense, diffuses, and then the person I was just as loggerheads with shrugs and says, It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter?

What were we just arguing about then?!

And I’m reminded that some people really do argue recreationally

(Jay’s not one of them, thank God, but this exchange reminded me of similar, less peaceful interactions).

Now, I enjoy a good argument– if it’s clear, and I think I can win, and I think it’s worth the effort– but part of what makes it worth the effort is that I actually care about the thing we’re discussing.

Anyway.

Image courtesy of pixaio via stock.xchng

I proof-read the first 35 pages of LINDORM after I printed out the whole thing, and in the 2nd chapter I found a bunch of pronouns that needed correcting.

I tried to continue the read-through after Page 37, but didn’t get far. I was just tired.

Then I figured, you know, I’m not publishing-publishing now. I’m doubtless going to make corrections/revisions in response to my Betas’ responses. So enough with the line-editing. Put it away. Let the ashes fall where they will.

And that felt really good.

One of my efforts at present is to be content with less-than-perfect.

Not strictly to celebrate sloppy (I don’t see that as any sort of need), but to keep things moving by accepting limitations.

This novel is being released now because I let some stuff go.

The second part of the story, to be specific. The Huge Second Part that refused to be wrestled into submission or structure or anything like coherence within acceptable word-counts.

Version 13.1 is 74,000 words.

Compared to version 8.7, it stops at chapter 21 of 45. Version 8.7 was 88,000 words.

All along this journey I’ve had people tell me I needed to break up the story, that it was too big for one book.  And I agreed, but I couldn’t give you two *whole* books out of this story, either.

“Whole” being defined as at least 65,000 words–  and that seemed short anyway.  I knew my genre, or the closest thing to it, and few of those books are tiny. I imagined the challenge it would be to connect with that type of reader when my book looked different from what was familiar.

Image courtesy of Verzon via stock.xchng

Revision #13 was going really well, and at some point I realized I was well past the natural break between the “set up” story (Modified Beauty & the Beast, where the Beauty is a single mom and the Beast is a dragon-sized serpent) and the *BIG* story of the second part.

I had already decided to indulge myself and “just see how the story flows” with word-count not a factor. With all the scenes left in.

I’ve also been reading (even re-reading!) a lot this year, and that added to the amalgam that has been my intense life over the last year. I saw things in this story I had only sensed before. I had words for feelings I’d never recognized.

And I put everything I could think of into my work.

The effectiveness of this new vision yet to be tested (figuratively biting my nails, waiting on reader responses), but my favorite addition to bulk/meaning in the story is the addition of non-story goals. Or, put a different way, Pre-Story Goals.

More on that tomorrow.

Brokenness, Healing and Art

I just got through The War of Art by Steven Pressfield last week.

My library had it on CD, which meant that my laundry finally got folded.

Pressfield starts out by defining resistance by its action and power, tying it to our main difficulty in writing (okay, he actually is very careful to keep the talk about ART and whatever one’s contribution to the world is. But for me, that’s writing).

Problem #1: Getting Started

He has a whole series of specific examples of delays to beginning the work, but especially because of my experience with depression, and the upcoming launch of Wyn Magazine, I was intrigued by Pressfield’s comments about (and waiting for) healing as a tool of Resistance, to prevent the beginning of a Great Work.

Image courtesy of Mihai Tamasila via stock.xchng

According to Pressfield there are whole communities of people investing such effort and resources into getting well that they aren’t doing much else.

In his book he says some people feel they need to be healthy before they can do, or make their art.

I have felt this way in a vague sense, thinking that what I wanted to say would have more legitimacy or authority if I’d passed some point of competency, but the idea of doing nothing until that point is a straightjacket of terror.

Why ‘terror’? (That is a rather melodramatic word, but it’s the best I have just now.)

Because without my art I am locked in the long white corridors or darkened rooms of myself. There is no escape. And that is terrifying.

Writing is the walking.

One foot in front of the other to travel these endless hallways, and slow familiarity teaches what direction could be more useful, and I eventually see a door, and my momentum feeds itself until I slam into that crashbar and break into the open air.

Image courtesy of Jenny Rollo via stock.xchng

I’ve had encounters with others, or their words, who feel that they cannot produce art without the brokenness inside them.  Elyn Saks, in her Ted Talk quoted poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said, “Don’t chase my devils away, because my angels may flee too.”

I have wobbled on both sides of that line, and the perspective I find most-comforting is what Pressfield expresses in his book. He insists that healing is not a prerequisite, because the part that needs healing is completely separate from the part that is creating.

The experience of brokenness can make the creating part of you more useful, but somehow, in this one-way economy, that brokenness can only add depth to what already is.

I like this model, this container of words, because it suggests that the reasoning of second quote—about needing to keep the demons around—is misplaced.

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Three Story Elements

I have the unfortunate habit of shooting myself in the foot sometimes, intellectually speaking.  I devalue something because it’s too easy, but can’t complete something else because it’s too hard.

So this speech (#7: “Research your topic”) when I kept hitting a wall, I took the easy road. I took an essay I wrote years ago to satisfy a three-points-and-a-conclusion Nazi. Then I upgraded it (to this version you’re about to see on the blog), then I cut it down to a 5-7 minute speech.

The whole thing felt horribly formulaic and “cheap,” and the points seemed so self-evident I wasn’t sure if it would count as “research,” but I got the job done, and it was even a job I could be proud of, so it all worked out in the end.

Maybe what I’m trying to learn is that easy doesn’t have to mean without value.

Maybe I could just call it straightforward.

Main critique of the speech: I need to be more aware of ambient noise in a room so I can try and match my volume to the needs of the space. This I appreciated. One of my goals is to teach more on specialized topics like these, so I’m glad when someone gets specific about presentation.

It tickled me to hear my evaluator say how I’d clearly researched my topic. I do suppose he’s right– it just happened so long ago it doesn’t feel like research any more :)

 

I began by reciting this section of Anderson’s The Nightingale in my best storytelling rhythm.

Death kept staring at the emperor out of the empty sockets in his skull; and the palace was still, so terrifyingly still.

Image courtesy of Akbar Nemati via stock.xchng

All at once the most beautiful song broke the silence. It was the nightingale who had heard of the emperor’s illness and torment. She sat on a branch outside his window and sang to bring him comfort and hope.

As she sang… the blood pulsed with greater force through the emperor’s weak body.

Death himself listened and said, “Please little nightingale, sing on!”

“Will you give me the golden saber? Will you give me the imperial banner? Will you give me the golden crown?”

Death gave each of his trophies for a song; and then the nightingale sang about the quiet churchyard, where white roses grow…and where the grass is green from the tears of those who come to mourn.

Death longed so much for his garden that he flew out of the window, like a white cold mist.

“Thank you, thank you, whispered the emperor, “you heavenly little bird, I remember you…. When you sang…Death himself left my heart. How shall I reward you?”

“You have rewarded me already,” said the nightingale. “I shall never forget that, the first time I sang for you, you gave me the tears from your eyes; and to a poet’s heart, those are jewels.”

There are as many different ways to tell stories as there are storytellers, but somehow we all know when we’ve heard a good one.

According to Albert Lavin, and English Teach and author, Stories, “are a way of organizing human response to reality…they are a fundamental aspect of the way we ‘process’ experience.”

A good story affects our feelings, our perspectives, sometimes even our world, if only for a blip of time. If it is a significant story, the change will be more permanent.

One desire of storytellers is to cause what is significant for the teller to become significant for a listener.

Flannery O’Connor, a famous short-story writer, observed, “A story is a way to say something that cannot be said any other way…. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”

With this goal in mind, of conveying significance, a good storyteller has many tools to help her. Elements that have been a part of telling as long as there has been language. Continue Reading →

Real-World Magic: Not Speaking

Image courtesy of ACSelcuk via stock.xchng

Someday, a really hope that I write a serious essay on the existence (and/or definition) of magic.

For today I’ve settled for discussing the first on my mental list: Spells of Silence.

Let me begin here: Fairy tale silences are beginning to make a lot more sense to me.

How many people, today or at any time in history, have been trained to explain what they can’t explain?

I mean, I am one of the most articulate, word-ready people I know (Sorry if that sounds bad, it’s just true), and I have found myself mute in the face of certain circumstances.

This even comes after years of practice talking about how confused I am, or how I don’t have the words for something. In those situations I would keep talking (or journaling) until I reached some kind of coherence, or at least the next action point.

Image courtesy of Michael & Christa Richert via stock.xchng

But something changed with the depression. I wonder at times (in the present) if I would have had some kind of help–more help– if I had tried harder to say how broken I was.

For the most part I kept quiet, because I didn’t have any better ideas to give people to give me, and I was pretty sure that criticism without offering alternatives was shameful. That was complaining and it  recalled countless references over the years to “the children of Israel” after they’d been led out of Slavery in Egypt.

“Here they’d had so great a deliverance and now they were complaining about the food?”

I had little to give in terms of nurturing energy, and I imagined that I was caring for others by keeping the weight of my problems off of them.  It made me feel nobler or more generous in my loneliness and isolation.

Image courtesy of Michaela Kobyakov via stock.xchng

I’ve since learned that “Self-blame is a symptom of the disease [of depression].” That “people feel ashamed of being depressed, they feel they should snap out of it, they feel weak and inadequate. Of course [they do:] these feelings are symptoms of the disease.”

And these symptoms all go a long way to keeping us shut up.

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Response to “A Letter to Teenagers”

I understand why this letter has gone viral and been so popular, but when I saw it on Facebook this morning (before I read the above article) These were my thoughts.

~ ~ ~

This letter is a good start (in the sense that we all need to be reminded to do what we can, and quit expecting others to do it for us) but these words don’t provide what I needed as a teen, and that was personalized direction.

I was a KID. I was even one who didn’t claim to know everything. And I didn’t know on my own which way to go other than to “be good.” And that is WAY to vague for most kids.

I was a good kid by most standards, and this letter being given to me would have made me feel simultaneously furious and helpless.

He’s just told me to get out of his way and quit being vocal about the fact that I have needs I don’t know how to meet.

All my life I had a drive to “make a difference” and “be involved,” but I did not have the skill/know-how/authority to make much of anything happen on my own.

Weekly visits to the nursing home (at 13) were with an adult, who eased me into being unafraid. Joining worship team (at 17 or 18) and before that forming a youth version (when I was 15) required an adult sponsor to give us access to the stage and sound equipment.

Even now, in my 30s, I know the fastest, most efficient way to know how best to apply my talents comes from outside help.

Why do you think “life coaching” even exists as a profession? We want solid, reliable input. Wise people don’t want to be limited to their own experience.

It always feels good to tell off people who are making your life more complicated, and the writer was described as “a judge who regularly deals with youth.”

I guess most of the readers/repeaters are parents, and AMEN! because they feel similarly pressed.

These parents have been dealing with and giving, like the judge says, and yes it’s perfect for the youth to “accept some of the responsibility your parents have carried for years.”

But I for one was never the kid who could look at a mess, see what needs to be done, and “just do it.”

I am BARELY that kind of adult.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from becoming a grown-up, it’s that the growing. never. ends.

And parenting (best as I can tell) is a lot of inconvenience.

We’re allowed to gripe, and call it hard, like it is, but eventually we have to swallow the frog; reenter the inconvenience of life-as-parent ’cause, really, nothing gets done until we do.

We have to change that diaper, find a bandaid, teach a concept and (Lord-Willing) cultivate a sense of self that will allow that child to develop a personal vision and motivation that will equip him or her to finally accept everything in his letter as a reasonable expectation.

Courage

Courage is a virtue recognized in every culture.OneWord2013_Courage150

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at its testing point, which means at its point of highest reality.

A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.

–C.S. Lewis

In The Mystery of Courage, author William Ian Miller asserts courage is unique among the virtues because it is the only one where stories of its opposing vice are less gripping or tantalizing than stories of the virtue. ;}

This is a story of my rediscovering courage.

~

There are two kinds of courage: physical courage and moral courage.

Both types, as General William Sherman observed, involve a full awareness of the risk involved, and a willingness to endure that risk.

There is an additional, third element within moral courage, and that is a driving motivation of some deeply-held principle.

When, at the end of December, I designated 2013 as a “Year of Courage” for me, I was not looking at these definitions.

I could not tell you what danger I felt was arrayed against me, or the mental math that I undertook to decide what made the risk worthwhile, or even what risk I felt I was taking.

Image courtesy of Bina Sveda via stock.xchng

What I could tell you is that months off of a two-year depression I was still a fearful person.  Not consciously, but pressed by a friend I admitted that I made most of my decisions primarily through the matrix of safety.

I did whatever I could to minimize every kind of risk, but it didn’t make me feel any safer, only claustrophobic.

Then, during Thanksgiving break, I read a blog post that made me ask, “What could I accomplish if safety wasn’t my primary objective?”

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