MEANINGMAKER

MeaningMaker

  • the first year

    I used to see a butterfly in my mind’s eye every time I heard the word ‘transformation,’ but life has taught me otherwise. Transformation isn’t a butterfly. It’s the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away.… Continue reading

  • home sweet home

    My parents sold the Tavistock house that I grew up in with my brothers and sister in the spring of 1988, just before I was done high school. That Rudy Avenue house, with the stone wall my dad built and… Continue reading

  • love letters

    My laptop was laying on the coffee table tonight so I picked it up and started snooping through old files thinking I would get rid of some stuff I don’t need — which, if you know me, really means I… Continue reading

  • tom t. hall speaks the truth

    Sometimes, the truth needs so little rehearsal. It just plops itself down in front of you like a fat, old man in an undershirt, smoking his cigars and admiring his bowling trophies.  Yesterday, on my way to work, I was… Continue reading

  • on dish cloths and dying

    My dad called tonight. I was doing what every respectable woman dreams of doing on a Friday night after a full work week — cleaning up the kitchen. I was actually standing at the sink staring at the fresh dish… Continue reading

  • this one’s for the girls

    I’ve been noticing a trend in my Facebook newsfeed lately. It seems like many of my female friends are on the precipice of transformation. Or reinvention. Or something – hard or beautiful, or both – that’s about to see you… Continue reading

  • pride: til then, we walk

    A year and a half before I was born… The way that I love was illegal. In most parts of the world. Loving like me was considered a mental health disorder. It was illegal for people like me to hold… Continue reading

  • lost in the right direction

    The surgeon, who for some reason felt the need to tell me she was originally from Kentucky, leaned down as I lay on the operating table in a pretty comfortable stupor and asked: “Do you make a habit of holding… Continue reading

  • coming to life

    I’m thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way a 12-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection turns into that of a woman on her wedding day,… Continue reading

  • my mother’s shoes

    From May 2019. Last Thursday morning I gave a talk to staff about my “leadership journey”. HR asked me to do it nearly a year ago when they were planning this year’s course catalogue and I’d given a hasty yes,… Continue reading