Write with TLC

Shame... Shame on you... Shame on me... You have no shame... Shame... Sighs! I am not ashamed of who I am or my life experiences. I am not ashamed... And, yet, there have been far too many moments of my life lived in shame, lived in the shame of someone else's perception of my existence and my experiences. We all have. We wear shame like a prism of everything we've done wrong shrinking us into our smallest selves and projecting reasons to not be loved into the world. I recently read I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't): Making the Journey from "What Will People Think?" to "I Am Enough" by Brené Brown (read my review ). When I started it, I had no intention of doing the exercises; however, I quickly changed my mind. As I read I realized that to have the full experience, to truly understand the book, I needed to do the exercises. Still, to be honest, I didn't expect to get much out of it...  After all, I'd already done this work... I

In a world where it feels like chaos dominates our lives, it can be hard to recognize peace when it arrives. Sometimes, though, we have to grab the little slivers of peace that sneak into our lives and cling to them like they are life preservers. When all we see is the chaos and pain life offers, peace slides into the recesses where it hides leaving us to question if there really is such a thing as peace at all. We spend so much time highlighting violence and hatred and vitriol that we ignore kindness and love and compassion. Not only are we surrounded by the chaos of violence in the real world, but we surround ourselves with it in our entertainment. We invite chaos into our lives even when there's no reason. We binge watch the violence in fiction and pretend like it's separate from real life. We want justice against the chaos even if we can only find it in the violent acts of fictional good guys exacting revenge on fictional bad guys. But, I wonder if we've become so