Category: Personal
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Dance Lessons
When I was a kid, my Grandmom was always telling my brother and I that we needed to “learn some culture.” I’m pretty sure it was because she was worried we’d grow up in Deep South Mississippi and not know anything about the rest of the world. She didn’t have to worry about that, but…
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Overload
The world has been too sharp. I wake up from sharp dreams in my sharp bedroom to the sharp sunshine stabbing in through my windows. It hurts my eyes and my ears and my skin. My heart rate is higher than usual all day and I’m tired, but not from lack of sleep. I sigh…
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Comfortable
I recently ‘adopted’ a bunch of plants. I say a bunch. I’m sure the planty people out there would not agree that the jumble of leaves and vines now gracing my patio qualify as a bunch. However, for someone who has successfully killed everything she’s tried to grow, it’s a *bunch* of plants, and they…
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Untethered
I dreamed the other night about going for a walk. Not just any walk, though. I was back amongst the vibrant greens and soft browns of my favorite trees. I’d left my shoes behind and my toes sank into the soft, damp moss as I padded past the massive cedars, firs, and spruces. I greeted…
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Linguaphile
I started learning my second language (Spanish) in my sophomore year of high school. I actually took two semesters of Latin before that which was my first introduction to learning a foreign language, but fluency wasn’t ever the goal for Latin. It taught me how to learn to pronounce words and sounds that felt unfamiliar…
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Softening
TW: this blog discusses body image issues, self harm, eating disorders, and diet culture. Please take care of yourself and skip it if you need to. 🙂 A few days ago I was scrolling through Instagram and I came across a post from Teri Hofford. She’d posted a beautiful photoshoot of herself with no clothes…
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The Slow Settle
There’s a specific kind of upheaval that comes with moving your entire life across countries and oceans. Obviously you leave behind friends and jobs and sometimes family, but there are also smaller, quiet things you grieve with each move. Your favorite coffee shop or bookstore, or hobbies you picked up in your last home that…
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Up ‘Til Now
Okay. Wow. Here we go. This website and blog have been a long time coming. Like, decades long. I’ve been writing creatively as an outlet since I was in middle school, maybe earlier. I always had an innate sense for how to put sentences and paragraphs together, even before I knew what adjectives or gerund…
Ladner Stroud 