I’ve always been a creative person. I’m enamored with color and design and imagination. I see things differently from a lot of people. As a kid, it was frustrating. Why couldn’t math just magically make sense to me? Why wasn’t my first reaction to see the logical solution? Why was my answer to a question always so different from everyone else’s?
Growing up in a family of left-brained people, I thought there was something wrong with me. So I put my creativity in the closet, treating it like that winter coat you use only when you need it but ignore during the other seasons.
Over the years, I’ve slowly come to accept my creativity, to open the closet and let my dominant right hemisphere roam freely. And a big part of that process was a book – A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. It was therapy for me. (more…)
I love words. Big ones, little ones, complex ones, simple ones. I’ve been enamored with them since I first learned the alphabet. It was as if I had unlocked a magical world I didn’t even know existed.
But sometimes words fail me. Sometimes I find myself staring at my resumé with no clue how to express myself. I think if I just focus long enough, my MacBook and I will achieve some kind of mind-meld and those words I couldn’t quite grasp will materialize on the screen. (It hasn’t happened yet, but I’ll keep you posted.)
“This is where the middle of your calf should be,” the doctor said, drawing a line on the x-ray.
The line he drew did not run down the middle of my calf. It ran along the side of my calf. My kneecaps, it turns out, are not quite where they should be.
Why are my knee caps elsewhere, you ask? No one really knows for sure. My best guess is a fall I took when I was about 3—a three-foot fall onto concrete. But whatever the cause of my misplaced kneecaps, I started having knee pain when I was a freshman in high school, prompting my visit to the orthopedic surgeon. (more…)