I said, It feels like you’re emotionally still married to him. That you haven’t let go of the pain of his leaving, even this many years later. She stared at me as if I’d crossed a boundary, spoken some unspeakable truth. I watched her eyes signal that she had left the conversation long before the hour ended.

She never came back.

When Jesse was a college junior, he told us he wanted to find his natural mother. So we handed him the file we’d developed when we adopted him twenty years earlier, and over the next several nights watched as he flipped through the pages of his personal history, filling in gaps in the stories we’d told him since we first talked with him about his adoption.

When I think about how I was raised, I naturally focus on my own experience as my parents’ child. But to more fully understand my childhood, it’s also important to understand the personal and social forces that bruised, blessed, and thereby sculpted my parents, all of which affected how they loved me - or didn't.

When I became a psychotherapist, I discovered, ever so slowly, that what works with children works with adults as well - except in this case it was my fear that I needed to deal with.

I sometimes operate with the delusional notion that if I intellectually master my circumstances, I can control them; if I reduce the world to what is reasonable, I will protect myself from those uneasy mysteries that are beyond reason.

It’s a rare experience to have a friend who is endlessly interested in you, who keeps urging, Tell me more. Talking honestly and listening carefully with insatiable curiosity: it’s the call-and-response sacrament at the core of our conversations.

Do you have a soul? Do I? I confess that, in the end, none of us really knows what our soul is, or how it functions, or if it even exists. But I now choose to imagine my soul as an internal constellation of memories, ideas, emotions, and beliefs.

I’ve been thinking about the first time the calamity of being poor, elderly, and alone slammed into me like a runaway train. I read in a newspaper article in 1995 that a summer heat wave in Chicago took the lives of 739 people, most of them elderly and living alone.

For months now we’ve walled ourselves off for our own and our neighbors’ sake. We’ve discovered more clearly something we’ve learned over the years, one step – or one stumble – at a time: marriage is a work in progress.

When the old stories still survive, even though you know at some level that they’re not true, it’s hard to exchange the familiar for the unknown, the comfortable for the genuine. Do I really want to examine the truth about myself? Do I need to?

I grew up with a vengeful God and like to believe I’ve outgrown such nonsense. But I find ancient bits and pieces of me wondering at moments if that vengeful God is pissed off at us and is punishing us for some undefined transgression.

Two months after I hired him he asked to see me privately; in that thirty-minute conversation he told me he was gay and that I was the second person he’d come out to.

I feel like I want to take a long stroll through my mind and explore what this season might mean to people who have their own story to tell.

I've been thinking about the painful and divisive conversations that took place during the recent election season, many of which continue.

Whose legacy lives like this in you? Who gnawed their way so deep into your soul that they live in you day by day? Whoever it is, we’re so fortunate to have loved such people, and to carry them with us forever.

Most of us want both. We want the pleasures available in each day, and we want the deep contentment that comes over time. We want to be happy; even more, we want contentment.

The proliferation of social media has changed the meaning of the word “friend.” What was always a noun (“you are my friend”) is now used as a verb (“I want to friend you”).

Like most of us, I grew up with basic certainties, but bit-by-bit, this fabric of certainty frayed.

More and more, I find myself living from the inside out and caring less and less about being measured from the outside in.