I cuss. I cuss a lot. My husband calls me trucker-mouth mama. Sometimes, I use it too casually, which doesn't have as much impact as I would like it to. It was a life-saver of sorts. It came into my life at a time when I struggled to express myself to the outside world, and it also gave me permission to say how I felt, even if it was just in the privacy of my room as a 7-year-old [...]
For me “not-enoughness” is something I have to bring awareness to consistently in my life. I am a marriage and family therapist, single mommy, single in general (lol), and just turned 40 years old. For starters being a single mom at 40 in the United States you constantly get “oh no what happened”. The looks from other married moms of “poor girl”. Dating men comes with the assumption that you’re hunting for a husband and ready to wed the [...]
When I decided to share my story on self-love and healing I wasn’t sure where I would begin because I am still on the journey currently. I think we all have had some sort of trauma in our life, either from childhood or as we become adults and meet people that we date or friends that let us down. Whatever that means for you. Life can be really hard sometimes. I grew up thinking if I could just live [...]
Ways unworthiness has shown up in my life are numerous: jobs, wonderful opportunities and the most painful of all: relationships! Over a period of about four years, I struggled with romantic partnerships. So much so, that I had stopped dating for two years so I could unravel the knot I felt I had gotten myself into. After many failed partnerships, I felt I was to blame. Somehow I was attracting partners that perpetuated feelings of unworthiness and that I wasn’t loveable. [...]
I was born in the Czech Republic while my country was occupied by the Soviet Union. I came from many generations of hard and tough people with a very standoffish attitude. A good example of this is that my parents never told me that they love me because this was not part of our culture. My mother was unconsciously riddled with anxieties and fears and my father always gave me a feeling that I wasn’t good enough. His way [...]
If you had told my parents when I was a kid that I would grow up to become a drug addict and alcoholic, they would have not believed it. In fact, when I called and told them at the age of 31 that I was a drug addict and alcoholic and that I was starting my journey in sobriety, they didn’t believe me. This was because I was very good at hiding my addiction. I was a very happy child. [...]
My Ballet Life: Ballet was something I inherently knew I wanted to do very early in life. Although I tried other forms of dance and musical theater as a child, I knew in order to get anywhere with ballet, I would have to make it a priority. And so from 15 years old on, I made it my top focus, with school being a close second. Hours a day were spent training in a studio where tights and leotards were [...]
My original intention behind this particular blog post was to write and share about my life-long battle with Body Dysmorphic Disorder. That was the inspiration behind the name of this website and project, The Abstract Mirror. As I began to sit down and write, my mind kept going completely blank, regardless of the many notes I had been accumulating over the course of the past few months. That experience will be a topic of discussion that I will take the [...]
I will start with a little backstory about myself. I grew up in a small town in Washington where higher education wasn’t exactly something most people strive for or even really talked about. A town where everyone stays there and never leaves; they marry their high school sweetheart and just do the normal day to day. I wanted more, ever since I was a little girl I would look up at the (more…)
I can remember the first time I was aware that I was different. It was in kindergarten. I was four and everyone else was five turning six. every single birthday party I was reminded of this. In elementary school - I dreamed of being lanky and thin but played tennis every day and was born curvy and was building my body (not on purpose) to be athletic and strong. Even though I exercised, at will, for four-five hours every single day because I [...]
