Over the weekend, I read some of Brene Brown’s older book, Daring Greatly. It’s always a toss up as to which lens her words will register through first for me, personally or professionally. Sometimes, it’s both. During this reading, I found myself hooked on her ideas about shame being gender based, and both sets of […]
Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
Emotional Styptic Pencil Needed on Aisle 3
Posted: 11th May 2016 by admin in BlogTags: #LGBT youth, Brene Brown, emotional abuse, gender, healing, shame, trans youth
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Lights Don’t Go Out. They Just Flicker.
Posted: 26th March 2016 by admin in Blog, UncategorizedTags: energy, grief, healing, lightworkers, resilience
“You can blow out the candle, but you can’t blow out the fire. Once the flames begin to catch, the wind will blow it higher.” ~ Playing for Change, Biko, 2009 I spend my days with lightworkers. I think you might know the kinds of people I mean—those folks whose very presence brings your day […]
Zapped Through Our Feet
Posted: 12th October 2015 by admin in BlogTags: animal experimentation, bomb threats, fear, hope, learned helplessness, resilience, school shooting
I live in a town that experienced a college campus shooting. In 2008, five NIU students were killed, plus the gunman. I moved here from a city that experienced the trauma of Pan Am flight 103, carrying thirty five Syracuse University students home from a semester abroad, exploding over Lockerbie, Scotland. All two hundred and […]
Reflections on a Revolution
Posted: 4th October 2015 by admin in BlogTags: #LGBT youth, challenges, HIV, LGBT history, life changes, PrEP, revolution
Seventeen years ago on the first Saturday in October, I sat in a park in Naperville, shivering and uncomfortable, dressed too lightly for how the temps dropped after the sun went down. I was at a Take Back the Night rally for domestic violence awareness, one of the first assignments of my brand new job […]
Family of Choice and Other Acts of Rebellion
Posted: 5th May 2015 by admin in BlogTags: challenges, family of choice, grief, healing, Ohana
“Ohana means family. Family means nobody is left behind or forgotten.” Simultaneous truths can be difficult to grasp, especially since we are engineered from the time we are tiny people to buy into binary systems on lots of topics. If we believe Point A, then we must not believe Point B. What happens at those […]
When Ya Gotta Go, Ya Gotta Go!
Posted: 25th April 2015 by admin in BlogTags: #coming out, #LGBT youth, #transgender, binary, gender neutral restrooms
A couple of months ago, it was major news that a bill was proposed in Florida to prohibit transgender people from using public, single-sex restrooms that do not match the sex they were born as. I saw arguments for and against, and eventually the story disappeared into the cyber dust that gets stirred up as […]
Fierce Kindness, Willful Love
Posted: 11th January 2015 by admin in BlogTags: #LGBT youth, challenges, hero, mentor, volunteerism, warriors
I met my first warrior at Corner Bakery on a cold, grey afternoon in 2007. She’d been recommended to me by two colleagues who thought she’d be able to help with some of the work our agency was doing at the time around funding and fundraising. I was still fueling my caffeine habit and over […]
A few blogs ago, I confided in you (and thanks for not telling anyone else) that I thought the Lesbian Association of the Midwest, or LAM as we call them for short, was going to descend upon my house, capture my lesbian membership card and haul it away with a big hook through it, while […]