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If you’re like many women, you pride yourself on setting other people at ease. On making clients, colleagues, partners, friends, children feel comfortable, making them feel heard, smoothing over any awkward bits or hiccups of tension. But when you prioritize everyone’s comfort a lot of other work doesn’t get done. Namely, yours. If there’s one…

When I was 32 years old I got sick. It wasn’t flu sick, and it wasn’t cancer sick; it was the kind of sick that strikes like lightning and nearly kills you on the spot with no advance warning whatsoever. I was on a business trip to a conference in Baltimore, and had become increasingly…

I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hire me. So I not only didn’t apply for promising jobs senior year of college; I didn’t apply to any jobs. Not one. While my fellow seniors were trotting off to the career center for this or that interview, I trudged back to my dorm room, as…

One of the perks of attending a private catholic, all-girls high school is that the bus picks you up at your front door. It’s a short bus, but a bus nonetheless. The driver is Medrell, a large, tough woman whose ample rear hangs over the edge of the seat and who doesn’t wait around for…

In the first TED talk ever to go viral, Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor details the workings of her mind during a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain in 1996. What she describes is inexplicable: When her left hemisphere, which governs that sense of us being separate and self-contained, begins to shut…

I was working as a copywriter at a wig catalog when I got the opportunity I’d always wanted: To work as an editor at a women’s magazine. I took the job—along with a $15,000 pay cut. I needed a side hustle. So while attending a jewelry party at a friend’s home, I watched the saleswoman…

There’s one big plus to cooking, aside from having something to eat. And it’s that when you do, your house smells like food. Sauteed onions. Roasted sprouts. Seared pork. A pot of jasmine rice. A slow cooker teeming with chili, the steam slipping out like a secret. An entire tray of bacon, hoisted out of…

When I was 23, I was hired for my first office job as an executive assistant at a management consulting firm in Cambridge, MA. I served as admin support for three brilliant management minds, one of whom used to work in the military and helped invent email. I only half understood what they did, or…

I put off reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit for a long time. I saw it come across the transom when I was an editor, and thought, there’s a brilliant, successful artist, and I’m sure we have nothing in common, and I’m sure she has lots of advice for things I won’t do. I’m sure…

As the first-born of three daughters, I was a self-disciplined kid. Well behaved. Type A. All A’s. I did my homework. I nailed, absolutely nailed, every spelling test, plus the bonus words. And I was sure I’d never, ever be smart enough. In the third grade, I missed a few days of school, and when…