Tag: anxiety
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A Pilgrim’s Progress
(Associate housing, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL) I’ve been thinking about pilgrimages lately. First, because I read Shawn Herron’s lovely book, A Thousand Miles to Santiago, about his journey along the Camino in France and Spain. Second, because I’m writing my next novel about the pilgrimage to the church of the…
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Making Room
As spring approaches with its longer days and more time to “do things,” I get a little anxious. What happened to my list of things to do this winter when I looked forward to cozy days writing in my office or sewing or knitting or reading or…? Eeek! Didn’t finish a thing. And now it…
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Code Blue Valentine
One day last week, I drove a friend to her doctor’s appointment. The temperature on my car thermometer read 42 in the garage and dropped ten degrees before I was even out of our street. Going up the highway, the numbers went down…32, 28, 20, 19. Stopping at the library to drop off two books,…
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Get It Down (While You Still Can)
Does anybody but me have this underlying anxiety, this fear of aging, of being unknown? Some days I think it’s the malady of our age. Otherwise, why the popularity of so much “escape” entertainment, TV, movies, the web, video games, gambling, drinking, etc. etc.? What are we escaping from? Facing our feelings, says Dr. Margaret…
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It’s Just Christmas
Yes, it is. December, that time of year when all around the Western world, people party and shop for pretty things and sing and eat delicious sugary goodies. But not this year. Not if we want to survive. The Covid pandemic has put a big wet blanket over the holiday season. Which has me thinking…
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Boo! What Scares You?
It’s almost Halloween, and in my corner of the world, you can take a haunted hayride, visit an abandoned penitentiary, or dress up like the walking dead. You can, not me. I don’t like to be scared. Come October, I’m all about comfort. Hot apple cider, knitting in my rocker while I watch the Hallmark…
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Dizzy Time
It’s been one of those days. My usual treatment for benign positional vertigo doesn’t feel like it worked. I’ll give it 24 hours. The crystals in my inner ear have been slipping out of their little vestibule, off and on, for something like twenty years, and when they do, I get dizzy. Since I discovered…
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Big Girl Pants
It was raining lightly when I got to the Borough Hall Station. I saw the sign on the street; all I needed was to find the entrance. People walked snappily by, like they knew where to go, and I wanted to look that way too. When I was young, New York City was my dream…
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The Comfort of Words
I read today that Joyce Carol Oates describes sitting down at her writing desk as “low dread.” Hmmm. Just how I see America today: “low dread.” What new horror will our president and his enablers bring upon us? Crying children torn from their parents, closing the door on immigrants because of their country’s majority religion,…
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Lipstick Print on a China Cup
Photo by Pexels Coffee doesn’t like me anymore. It upsets my stomach. But whenever I see someone walking down a city street, lidded paper cup in hand, I want one. In my early 20’s, coffee and a cigarette started my day. On the way to work, I stopped in the lobby of the Erie County…
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The In Between Time
This is the week in the year when I feel most in-between. Thanksgiving and Christmas are over and a New Year waits in the wings. I feel like the director of a play in which I hold back the actors for just another moment. Not yet, it’s not quite time, we’re not ready, please wait.…
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Origami Morning
Her little fingers fumbled with a sheet of yellow construction paper. An over-sized white camp T-shirt hung down over her ruffled skirt. Her bright pink sneakers matched the headband in her jet-black hair. Inside the activities room, nineteen other kids, ages five to twelve, sat at tables scattered with sheets of colored paper. A middle-aged…
Linda C. Wisniewski 