Category: Finding Your Voice

I have no business being rich. I grew up curling my bangs in a trailer park, using food stamps to buy popsicles, dating boys who milked cows, bringing boom boxes to stone quarries, and thinking tinted car windows were the ultimate sign of prestige. If you made a sitcom hybrid of My Name is Earl, Roseanne and The Office, you’d find my 15 year old self waving awkwardly from the back of somebody’s blue pickup truck—except probably literally, since The

I have a friend named Melissa. (Yes, I have friends.) Melissa doesn’t have a job. She spent her twenties and thirties working for other people as a professional headhunter–(am I obligated to make a Headless Horseman joke here?)–before finally going back to school to pursue an advanced certification in Human Resources. And then she waited. And she waited. And she waited. For years. Every job interview she went on, she was either overqualified, or the role she wanted was already

It’s polite to: …fulfill your obligations. …answer them back right away. …nod in agreement. …go with the flow. …do as you’re asked. …drink because they are. …take their call. …give your undivided attention. …fill the silence. …and always be there when they need you. Then again, no one’s ever done anything remarkable by always being polite. Be stingy with your time in 2013. It is, after all, yours.

  You aren’t crazy for wanting what hasn’t even occurred to them to want. You aren’t crazy for needingwhat they would only deem a luxury. You aren’t crazy for demandingthat circumstances yield to you, instead of the other way around. And you aren’t crazy for taking what it means to be human, and turning it upside down.   You aren’t crazy for trying. Crazy for loving. Crazy for caring. And you certainly aren’t crazy for living.   You aren’t crazy

Well, well, well – look at TMFproject blowin’ it up with blog posts on the daily. Don’t get used to it. At some point I will absolutely go back to 2-3 posts/week – probably once I get skinny again and being outside in a bathing suit is actually FUN. Ahem. (Wait, will I ever get skinny again?) (Wait, did I really just aggressively gnaw into a hunk of cheese while asking that?) (Of course I did. IT’S CHEESE.) Today, however,

His name is Oskar. He’s Rastafarian. I met him when I first came to Costa Rica in 2004 and watched him trying to sell his paintings day after day on the beach, sweating, struggling to speak English to the tourists who passed by, working from dusk until the wee hours of the night to make ends meet, some days going without any food in his stomach because he needed the little money he did have to buy more paint. “I

All the things you think you need this year, you don’t. You do not need more determination. You do not need more discipline. And you certainly do not need more diligence. Are you kidding me? You are a Westerner–you’ve got plenty of that. Why else have you gotten up every single day and begrudgingly gone off to work at that job that makes you miserable? Why else have you lived your life doing things you don’t like, because you “have