I love the Op-Ed section of the paper. I believe we all need to write at least one letter on something we’re passionate about in our lifetime. In saying that, I applaud this reader
Columnist Danny Westneat highlights the need for more shelters. I have firsthand experience working at the largest shelter in Spokane before it closed this October — just before the ground froze over. Although the living conditions were appalling, people were warm and connected to services, like the street medicine team I volunteered with.
That shelter was supposed to be replaced with several smaller sites. Only one opened — 250 beds replaced by 60. The other shelters have increased their capacities but remain full. Now, I encounter folks I cared for on the street in the freezing winter sleet.
We urgently need more shelter space. But we must also address homelessness’ root causes: soaring rent prices, wage stagnation and eroded social safety nets, to name a few. Policies like rent stabilization would protect renters who may face housing instability.
Pitting temporary and permanent housing solutions against each other is a zero-sum game. We cannot wait for new housing. The street medicine team recovered someone’s body from under an overpass recently. There is no path out of this without simultaneously funding shelter space and long-term solutions — and our state has the wealth to do both.
What’s something that gets in the way of your creativity, and how do you move through it?
Anxiety is a big one. There are a million little things to do and they crowd my mind and make me anxious. My creative work is how I make a living so when I worry about money, which I do all the time, my creativity suffers. Perfectionism and even near-perfectionism (and even just-okay-ism) make me anxious and make me fearful of writing and block my creativity.
My best antidote for all of that is to remember that writing is so much more than putting fingers on keys — it’s conversations about ideas, and weird things that happened to you on an errand, and a poem that you read repeatedly or a song that plays in your head. I break down my creative process into bite-sized chunks sometimes, allowing myself the grace to listen to that song or to run that errand or to connect with someone else for a bit and it always gets my mind going. – R. Eric Thomas
Positively Purging-I welcome your feedbacks in the comments and your likes and passing the real-life wisdom on to others as I embark on this new venture of “positively purging”, as I know each of these pieces represents something
My partner of almost 25 years, “Mary,” started perimenopause around 10 years ago, and her menopause symptoms have gotten progressively worse. Our son, then 5, is now 15 and he sees only this version of his mother — not the positive, interested person she was for so many years.Mary also devalues and damages her friendships, holding people to unrealistic standards, reading the worst possible interpretation of actions and comments, often believing her friends don’t like her or think she is stupid. Her work also suffers from negative self-talk.
After trying several prescription options, she used one that brought her back to the optimistic and positive person she was before. Unfortunately, there was a side effect of nausea, so she stopped taking the medication and her symptoms returned. She’s now refusing to try other options or return to the gynecologist, and when I try to encourage her, I’m told I don’t understand and have no empathy for her situation.I know I’m not experiencing this personally, but nausea seems to me a small price to pay for all the mental upside. I don’t think she can see how bad her frame of mind has become and how it is impacting her relationships.The Change:
The Change: It’s a “small price to pay” because you’re not the one wanting to puke 24-7.
So that’s a no go. And continuing to pitch that argument to her just hands her a win with her you-don’t-understand-and-lack-empathy point.
That’s too bad, because you’re actually the one with the bigger, more valid point to make here: Mary is within her rights to refuse treatment, of course — but it’s a shortsighted decision if she’s making it without full consideration of its cost to the in-house adolescent who is counting on her mightily right now.And its cost to you, and her friends, and her career, yes, and of course to her own health, which may have more going on given the severity and duration (not that the current diagnosis must be wrong or isn’t sufficiently serious). But it’s her son who’s currently having his one shot at childhood, no do-overs — so that’s where you focus.Start by apologizing for your breezy dismissal of unrelenting nausea as “small.” I am fixating on this, yes, but wow. It’s small if you choose it for yourself, not if you choose it for someone else, K? K.
Then, bring it back to your — her — son. As sympathetic as you are to her internal experience, the external symptoms make up a disproportionate amount of his relationship with her. And your role here as partner and parent is to think forest while she’s preoccupied with her tree — as you hope she would do for you if you were in the midst of a personal struggle.
Then bring it back, again!, to your full awareness and appreciation for the size of the ask. You know you are asking her to run chemical experiments with her body and moods. Then say you wouldn’t ask if it weren’t about the welfare of the one person you feel justifies asking it.
Just one thing before I go. The interactions between parents and mid-teens aren’t always exemplary even when parents are at their best. So before you ask for anything in your son’s name, be sure what you’re witnessing is really about her symptoms and what you’re asking for is really about his well-being. It never hurts to run a deep scan for self-interest before you go crusading in.
Real Life of an MSW 