Page Turner's Blog, page 61

I Would Like to Feel This Later, But I Can’t

Someone I love very much passed away last week. Even as I type those words, I want to delete them. Because I don’t want to talk about it. Not at all and certainly not in public. Because I don’t write well enough to do the experience the justice it deserves (especially not now, as I’m more existing than really living).  » Read more

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Being a Planner During a Pandemic Is a Double-Edged Sword

It’d be a really odd notion to my younger self, particularly the wild mess of emotions I evolved into temporarily in my teens and early 20s, that I’m a planner.

But these days, I most certainly am. I’m a planner. And not always in ways that are adaptive and serve me. But sometimes illogically.  » Read more

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Huh. Apparently Taller People Are More Satisfied With Their Lives

I confess: I’ve always wanted to be taller.

Oh great, now Skee-Lo is playing in my head. I’ll be back in about 4 minutes to finish this essay after I listen to that magnificent earworm. I wish. I wish.

Okay, I’m back.

It’s not that I’m short,  » Read more

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Rough Sex Has No Link With Abuse, Is Initiated About as Often by Women as By Men & Typically Isn’t Very Rough

As I’ve written about many times before, I grew up in a fairly conservative large Catholic family in the Maine woods. We didn’t talk about sex openly. When it was addressed, it was always uncomfortably and framed as something bad that I as a woman would go through in order to have what I as a woman should really want —  » Read more

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I’ve Been With the Rebound Guy for Almost a Decade

2011

“Be careful,” she told me.

“Oh?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“I know you’re crazy about this guy, but it’s all so new,” she said.

I smiled. “Yeah, I get that. I know all about New Relationship Energy. I know what that feels like.” New Relationship Energy (or NRE) is a term for the biochemical state that your body enters when you’re first falling in love,  » Read more

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When Someone Asks You How You’re Doing & Then Walks Away Before You Can Answer

I don’t want to ever be a person who asks how someone else is doing and walks away before they have time to answer.

If I don’t have time, if I don’t actually want to know, I won’t ask. And if I do ask, I’ll be prepared to sit with the answer, however difficult or convoluted it is.  » Read more

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I Can Explain It to You, But I Can’t Make You Take It Seriously

I write a lot of articles about my quirks. And I will frequently get a specific kind of comment whenever I do. Ones that go little something like this: “It’s awesome that you know yourself so well. Just make sure you tell your partners when you start dating.”

And of course I do.  » Read more

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That Moment When You Realize You’ve Grown Apart From Someone

“I am so upset with them,” I say, confiding in a friend.

“What did they do this time?” my friend asks. Because this is far from their first rodeo as far as this long-term friend of mine is concerned. Where once upon a time, we were truly close, there have been a series of unbelievably disappointing occurrences over the past several years.  » Read more

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People Can and Do Change But Not Just Because You Want Them To

“People don’t change,” he says.

And I can tell he thinks he’s absolutely right by the way he says it. But that’s the funny thing about confidence: It doesn’t always equate to accuracy or skill (in fact, there’s research that suggests that confident people are less skilled, and more highly skilled folks are plagued by doubt).  » Read more

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What Is the Tragedy of the Commons?

I think a lot about fear and selfishness. This is partly because no matter how hard I try, I can’t escape my own. Not completely. No matter how much my higher brain tries to override those impulses, there’s something else that lives within me that’s primitive, ever-present.

And sometimes it’s screaming like Hell.  » Read more

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