Raindom Thoughts

This is not about one woman. This is about what 500 years of spiritual and cultural starvation looks like when it meets a ring light and a wifi connection. This is about the grandmother’s kitchen being replaced by a comment section. The elder’s wisdom being replaced by a highlight reel. The ancestral ceremony being replaced by a live stream. This is about us. All of us. Still on the journey back to ourselves. Still sometimes reaching for the mirage because the real water feel

They borrowed our faces, our elders, our wisdom. And sold it back to us. Pay attention.

Let me ask you something before we get into all of this. Do you actually like the opposite sex? Not love in the way we perform it for the camera. Not the highlight reel we curate while the relationship is burning in the next room. I mean down in the body. In the quiet. Do you trust them? Do you feel safe with them? Do you believe, somewhere beneath all the strategy and the armor and the carefully managed distance, that they see you and mean you well? Take a second with that.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not have a name yet. It is the loneliness of a child who was never alone, but was never truly seen. The parent was there, technically. The meals were made. The clothes were washed. Maybe there were even birthday cakes and Christmas mornings and the occasional “I love you” said out loud in front of people. But underneath all of that, the child knew something was off in the way only children know things: in the body, before the

"When the system denies you legitimate access to wealth, the body becomes one of the only remaining things you own outright. The strip club,

Hate Is a Love Story Gone Wrong. Sit with that for a moment before you read another word. Because I know what it does to you. I know the resistance that rises, the instinct to push back, to say “no, hate and love are opposites, they cannot share the same root, they cannot come from the same broken place inside a human being.” But stay with me. Because if you have ever loved someone who needed to diminish you to feel powerful. If you have ever been in a relationship that felt,

I need to remind you who is writing this before I write another word, because this particular conversation requires that kind of honesty. I am an ordained minister. A former hospital chaplain. A theologian who has spent more years than I can easily count sitting with the sacred in its most unguarded forms. At bedsides where death was making its slow and certain approach, in therapy offices where the accumulated weight of religious wounding had finally become too heavy to carr

I want to start with a night I have carried with me for years, because I think it belongs at the beginning of this conversation more than anywhere else. I was a hospital chaplain, called to a room in the middle of the night where a man was dying. I had learned by then what it felt like to open a door into a room where death was present and family was gathered. The way something in the room would shift slightly when I arrived, the way grief exhausted people would allow themsel

I have spent a significant portion of my life sitting with people in their most broken places. In hospital rooms where death was making its slow and certain approach. In therapy offices where the accumulated weight of a lifetime finally became too heavy to carry alone. In communities where the wounds were so old and so deep that the people living inside them had stopped being able to see where the wound ended and where they began. And in all of that sitting, across all of tho

There is a moment that lives in almost every relationship. Sometimes it arrives quietly, sometimes it arrives like a door slamming in the middle of the night, when the heart makes a decision. Not a conscious one. Not a decision you sat down and reasoned through. But a decision nonetheless, made somewhere below thought, in the ancient and intelligent part of you that has always been more concerned with your survival than your happiness. The decision is this: not again. And jus

Public Service Announcement : I am a clinical psychologist who is, at my core, a poet. And poets do what scientists and lawyers and preachers sometimes cannot, which is make up the words we need when the ones we have aren’t large enough to hold the truth. We can now begin …. So I made up a word. Gendoxicity I have never seen it anywhere before, though maybe it was floating around in some laboratory where someone else was wrestling with the same question I keep returning to,

The first thing you ever knew was joy. Not happiness, because happiness is a weather system, the kind that arrives and departs depending on conditions, on whether the day cooperated, on whether people showed up the way you needed them to. Joy is something older and deeper than that. Joy is the ground the weather moves across. It was there before you had a single word for it, before the world handed you a list of things you had to accomplish before you were allowed to feel goo