Hey Reader, You have probably been told to calm down more times than you can count. Breathe, think positive, stop letting it get to you, as if you had not already tried all of that a hundred times. Here is what nobody tells you. There is nothing wrong with you when your mind will not settle. It is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is scan for danger. And when there is no real danger in front of it, it goes looking. A short reply, a look you could not read, a text that still has not...

Hey Reader, You're not lazy. You're not too sensitive. And you're not failing at the things everyone else seems to find easy. You might just be cold-blooded. Stay with me, because this reframe genuinely changed things for me. Some of us are warm-blooded — we stay fairly steady no matter what's going on around us. And some of us are cold-blooded. If you're cold-blooded, your surroundings decide a whole lot about how well you function. The noise, the mess, the too-little sleep, the overfull...

Hey Reader, Something goes wrong, and before you've even had a second to think, you already know whose fault it is. Yours. The apology is halfway out of your mouth before you've checked whether you actually did anything at all. I want to name that, because most of us don't even see it happening. We just call it being responsible, being the woman who owns her part. But there's a difference between honest accountability and quietly assuming that every hard thing traces back to something you did...