“Have you ever heard of the forgotten history of the human race? Probably not, being that it’s been forgotten.
Well, I’ll tell you the story the way it was told to me:
A long, long time ago, before any Christs or Buddhas or grocery stores, there lived a group of humans. No one quite agrees on how they came to be, but it was clear they arrived and they wanted to stay alive and became very busy trying to do so.”
A conversation about what to do when you feel bad about how you look.
(Suitable for all ages.)
A little boy wants to get into his toy closet, but an elephant is blocking his way.
(Suitable for all ages.)
My son has lost a lot of people in his life already, and he often asks me to call my mother on my heart-phone so he can talk with her. I do a pretty good imitation of my mother and try to imagine what she’d say. Sometimes it really does feel like I’m channeling her. This is one of those conversations.
(Suitable for all ages.)
A poem for children and families experiencing loss and grief, based on my book Anchors in the Storm.
(Suitable for all ages.)
“Because of secret traumas we carry from being repeatedly dismissed and gaslit, many of us don’t have the skills to be able to recognize that we’re no longer in those old toxic situations. And we don’t have the skills to be able to distinguish a daily conflict from a war.
We may not realize that as adults we are safe inside ourselves now. That we can actually consider another person’s perspective without making it mean that our own perspective is invalid.”
(Suitable for adults.)
A story about what to do when other people try to give you their pain, based on my own true story of being bullied.
(Suitable for tweens, teens and adults.)
“My name is Redmond but everyone calls me Mean Red because I’m mean. I heard a couple people whispering about me the other day. They were wondering why I’m so mean. And it got me thinking. I’ve known for a while that I’m good at being mean because I make a lot of kids cry. But I never really thought about how I got this way. So I thought about it and remembered.”
A mean boy tells the story of how he became mean.
(Suitable for all ages.)
“Once there was a mother and a son who were having trouble connecting.
They used to connect all the time. I mean that’s ALL they did. But then little things started getting in their way. And those little things stacked up, like a wall between them. It used to be they would play all day. On the floor with trains or Legos. They’d make up stories that lasted hours, sometimes even days. The mother was tired. But her boy meant everything to her, so when he wanted to connect, she was pretty good at pretending she was wide awake. But then she stopped being good at pretending.”
A story about a mother and her tween son who wanted to connect but had a wall between them.
(Suitable for tweens, teens and adults.)
“Katie McKeever was the new girl in third grade. Katie McKeever was perfect. She didn’t walk, she did back handsprings. She received standing ovation after ovation not only from her peers but from her teachers, some of whom skipped their lunch breaks just to watch her on the balance beam.
It was at that moment I knew I had to be a gymnast. Unfortunately, a gymnast I was not. I took one fall off the balance beam and had to be rushed to the nurse’s office.”
(Suitable for all ages.)
“This is a story about the wickedest witch in all of the land. They didn’t even make a movie about her, that’s how wicked she was. She had so many people in her dungeon, she had to hire a big company to make her a second dungeon. That’s how wicked she was.”
A wicked witch falls from the sky due to a broom malfunction. After landing in a cornfield, she meets a farmer and they wind up helping each other in surprising ways.
(Suitable for all ages.)
“I’ve noticed that a lot of times, people get triggered by each other because they’re coming from different perspectives, but don’t realize it.
When a person sees circumstances from a top floor perspective, life can be understood metaphorically or conceptually or theoretically.
When a person sees circumstances from the ground floor, they’re in survival mode.
And in these moments on the ground floor, a person’s life depends on being able to navigate what’s going on down there and being available to respond. And for good reason. They very well may be fighting for their survival—whether the battle is within or from being traumatized or persecuted by another. Or perhaps their jobs on the ground floor are about saving other people’s lives.”
(Suitable for tweens, teens and adults.)
“Once there was a tiny boy. Well, everything about him was tiny except for the pinky finger on his left hand. By the time this little boy was 4 years old, his pinky finger was the size of his dad.”
A little boy has an extra long pinky and his parents worry it’ll never fit into the world. An allegory for people who may not feel like they fit into society, but how really, there’s plenty space for everyone to be just as they are.
(Suitable for all ages.)
“When unpleasant things happened to me when I was younger, my younger self diligently recorded the details of the event so that if I ever found myself in a situation even remotely similar, she could warn me that something toxic was near.”
(Suitable for teens and adults.)
“Here’s a secret: I have an elevator in my body. Yup. And it takes me wherever I want to go.”
(Suitable for all ages.)
“To me, an intrusive thought is any thought that interrupts what you want to be doing with reasons why you shouldn’t be doing it, reasons that make you feel bad about yourself. Throughout my life, I’ve dealt with a lot of intrusive thoughts, but because of this, I’ve been able to come up with some techniques to reframe them, diffuse their intensity, understand them in new ways, and even turn them into insights. So though I don’t expect what worked for me will work for everyone, I thought I’d share, just in case it’s useful.”
A piece about intrusive thoughts and some ideas for how to reframe them, diffuse their intensity, understand them in new ways, and even turn them into insights.
(Suitable for tweens, teens and adults.)
“I have a confession.
Oh, how I wish I could keep it to myself. But the burden has grown too heavy.
You see… I… am not who you think I am.
I am… a phony.”
A very cute dog wishes his owners would understand that there's so much more to who he really is.
(Suitable for all ages.)
“Once upon a time there was a boy who really loved getting ice cream from this one particular store. Several times a week he went to this store and every time, he left the store with his ice cream.
Life was good.
Until one day he went to this store, to where the ice cream was, except there was no ice cream.”
When The Ice Cream Ran Out is an allegory about being attached to something that’s no longer available the way it once was—maybe a friendship that’s faded, or a favorite place that’s gone out of business—and how difficult it is to let go of what used to be, until we remember that we can shift our focus elsewhere and discover a new world of other wonderful things.
(Suitable for all ages.)
“Once there was a little girl who loved to count.
’Mama,’ she said one morning. ‘I’m going to count to infinity!’
’But darling,’ her mother replied. ‘There’s no time to count to infinity!’
But the little girl was precocious and wanted to find out for herself.”
The story of a little girl determined to count to infinity.
(Suitable for all ages.)
“Sometimes I think kids imagine that grown-ups have it all together. And though many of us have worked hard to deliver the best version of ourselves out into the world, many of us grown-ups are still growing and still trying to understand what’s underneath our own behavior, while trying at the same time to be there for our kids while they develop their own best versions of themselves.
And sometimes this can get messy, especially when us grown-ups have our moments, those moments when our best selves get lost underneath our own upsets.
So I thought it might be useful to share a family drama of my own, so anyone of any age can get a glimpse of what happens when three people—me, my son, and my husband—are all having difficulty seeing each other’s concerns in the heat of a moment.”