Parchment-toned hero image for the Library of From the Lees showing the lees dictionary definition.

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  • I don’t trust that I’ll be held

    Money is the easy culprit. Every year, the same shortage. Every plan, the same constraint. At some point the pattern isn’t bad luck. It’s a choice I keep making. If I don’t, who will?

  • Knowing better is the price of being loved

    R broke something. My dog had broken a similar thing, and I hadn’t reacted like this. The difference wasn’t the object. I applied a standard to a seven-year-old that had nothing to do with him – and everything to do with whoever taught me the exact thing I was passing to him without questioning.

  • We stop wanting so we don’t have to accept grief

    I care more about achieving outcomes than almost anything else in my life. When something I want feels out of reach, I don’t sit with the wanting – I shut it down. I spent weeks unable to list a baby carrier for sale. I told myself I was being indecisive. But I was just avoiding the grief of accepting I might not have another baby. Wanting is more comfortable for me to feel.

  • Self-blame is a strange leap we don’t notice making

    When something goes wrong, I turn the mirror on myself. What did I do, what can I learn, what’s mine to own. Most of the time this serves me. But when I’m not understood by someone, the same practice betrays me. I only know my story – not what they perceived happened, not the story they live inside. The mirror only reflects what is known to me. The failure is believing the mirror was reality.

  • Your mind doesn’t need to know

    People say you need to name your emotions to release them. My body has been teaching me something different. I don’t always know what I’m feeling or why something hurts. I’ve learned I can let it go without knowing. The sensation moves whether or not my mind has a story.

  • Pulp happens before the butterfly emerges

    I don’t change through discipline or friction. It happens in a moment. A belief crumbles. The old version of me ceases to exist. Values realign instantly. I’m not who I was, and not yet who I’m becoming. I just live inside the new version long enough, and the compounding is what people call transformation.

  • Beliefs keep you safe when you don’t trust yourself

    I used to believe hangry would always happen whenever I was hungry. Fasting wasn’t even on the table. I encountered enough information to make me curious to try it. What I learned wasn’t that I could fast. It was that my belief was a self-imposed limitation that crumbled with self-trust.

  • The quiet days don’t count themselves

    My dog gets attention when she’s doing the wrong thing. This trains her that doing right things isn’t worth being seen for. I do it to myself too. The days I don’t produce don’t register. I only count when I’m fixing.

  • They think they want to know, but they often can’t handle it

    Every workplace tells you to call it like it is. Name the blocker, speak up, be direct. So I did. What I didn’t see is that most people confuse thoughts for emotions and emotions for thoughts. What you thought you said isn’t what they received. You named a problem. They felt an attack. The ideal of putting emotions aside in the workplace is fiction.

  • The gap between what you do and what you wish you did is not laziness

    I painted a dresser. I hosted a birthday party. I sewed a doll. I bake enough bread so that our family always has bread. I go to yoga most days. I grow some fruit and vegetables in our backyard. I still call myself lazy because I don’t live in a clean house and I’d rather learn about taxes than do something about it.