Looking back, I don’t feel like I was a good candidate for marriage. I was resistant to everything surrounding the institution … I didn’t want an engagement ring, a symbol of exchange and ownership, so Jed bought me my first computer instead. I didn’t want a fancy dress, or a big wedding, or a tiered cake, but in the end, I succumbed to all of it. 

I had sworn off marriage, and then I visited my grandmother, on the way back to Charlottesville for my second year of graduate school, and she insisted I give the one she called “the doctor” — “his name is Jed, and he’s a medical student,” I corrected her — she insisted I give him one more chance. So I did. Here’s that story.

The rest happened very fast, and two years later, with seven lilac-sheathed bridesmaids and seven groomsmen in matching black tuxes, in front of 200 people, we spoke the vows we wrote ourselves and then had our friends say the traditional “seven blessings,” English and Hebrew. Looking back, it still feels dreamy and out of time. 

I found our wedding photos to submit with the dress, and asked myself out loud, “How did you go from the feminist so opposed to marriage to the feminist married and living in the suburbs?” 

A friend and business mentor said, “Some of your current writing feels too attached to old ideas of yourself. Maybe it’s time to cut the thick cords that bind you to those old ideas of yourself and free yourself to see what springs up instead.” 

That idea struck a chord. You might say I remain in rebellion against that role of wife and mother that defined me for so many years, that it chafes against my skin like the veil that surrounded me on our wedding day. Where does that come from, and how might I cut those cords and step out into my life in the present today?

I’m listening to Mark Wollyn, It Doesn’t Start With You – for the second time – and thinking about intergenerational patterns and stories that run under my family, silent and repeated, like frozen earth waiting to thaw. 

On my mother’s side, the moody and creative entrepreneurs, there were at least two generations — my grandmother and my aunt — who wanted to be healers, but landed elsewhere. My uncle married a doctor, and I went to college imagining I’d be a doctor too. 

I wake from a nap remembering how my body contracted in the first meeting of Organic Chemistry my freshman year of college. I closed my notebook with a snap and left, almost running out the door, before the class was even halfway done. I didn’t even know them, but felt, deep inside, that I didn’t like those people — mostly guys — who wanted to be doctors. Looking back, I want to say it was the sense of entitlement those guys exuded, but at the time it was just a feeling, wordless, about what I could or couldn’t do. 

Jed was not like the other pre-med guys. He was very quiet, governed by simple principles, reluctant to visibly lead. He listened to his friends and helped them figure things out. It was not against him I was rebelling, but the idea of marriage and all it represented about women being subservient to men. All of that was embodied in the fancy wedding dress my mother helped me pick out, watching as it was fitted to my small frame in the boutique six or maybe seven floors above 57th Street in New York. 

My mother and step father walked me down the aisle. Since my mother died last summer, and I’ve been sorting through her things, I’ve said many times that her second husband was “the great love of her life.” They were married only a decade, my wedding smack in the middle of that wondrously happy decade 

My father and mother had an unusual marriage for the sixties and early seventies. They were in business together, and very much equals. When my father got sick, my mother took over the advertising business they started in the basement of our house two years after I was born. Both sets of my grandparents worked together in grocery stores they owned. This idea of the sturdy immigrant mother, who works side-by-side her husband to help provide for her family, runs very deep in my veins. 

Those same grandmothers cared for husbands who lived long lives with chronic illnesses that could not be controlled or contained. My mother’s mother went back to work, learning to drive for the first time, after her husband died when she was 55. My grandmothers were sturdy, partners and providers at once, into their later years. That is where I find myself now. 

In the later chapters of It Didn’t Start With You, Wollyn describes the healing process of exploring where you are stuck, gently voicing it to your descendants and freeing yourself and them. I’m stuck in all sorts of ideas about money, and the importance of “making money” to secure your family’s survival. But my family are no longer immigrants struggling to survive. If my deeply felt sense of tending the next generation through honest healing and forward repair still resonate, my survival wounds around marriage and money have lost their usefulness and yearn for further clearing. I’m curious to explore that thread around marriage and money in a future newsletter. If you think that would be useful for you, please let me know! 

What is an idea you hold onto about yourself that has outlived its usefulness? Where does that idea come from? And what are the cords you need to but to be born into the parts of life that call you next?

It felt like something my father might say, both simple and oracular, possible and impossible at once. When I say such things out loud, it is as if my father – who died when I was only sixteen – is speaking through me. It took me a long time to not run and hide when such simple, inescapable truths showed up in my own mind. 

Sometimes, so tired I can’t think of anything more mundane to say, I ask a new person I meet, “What is the big thing we are supposed to do together? The thing no other two people could do, and neither of us can do alone?’ It is no wonder, people sometimes think me crazy when I talk like that! 

And then, there are the times I don’t say those words but embody them and between me and a total stranger something miraculous appears. 

Last week, driving to visit Rabbi Julie Roth in her office at Shomrei Emunah in Montclair (the story of my relationship with Rabbi Julie is another important story), I called an Uber. My husband Jed and I had organized everything so I could drive his car to that meeting, and then I forgot the plans and called an Uber. The Uber smelled brand new, and so I said, without thinking, “Wow. Your car is so clean and new. I feel special to ride with you today. Don’t follow the GPS, it’s better if you go this way … “

We talked about so many things, the driver and I. He drives an Uber, along with another job, to pay for his college education. I said that I know many people who use Uber like this – to fill the open blocks in their schedule to make enough money to pay their bills and build a better life for themselves and their families. We talked about the crushing burden of debt many people face after college, and he said he would not borrow money for college. He talked about his recent divorce, and running into his wife out with another man, and all the things he’d felt about that moment. We discovered that we are both learning to listen better, and he told me about a book his therapist had recommended to him, It Didn’t Start with You by Mark Wolynn. “How did I not already know this chestnut about intergenerational trauma?” I asked myself.

*

It is uncanny the way we meet someone for just a few minutes and everything changes. It’s actually like this all the time; we just don’t notice it most of the time. 

Today is my 42nd wedding anniversary. I’m reminded that I wasn’t supposed to be where I was when I met my future husband. It took my friend getting mono, me being able to pay $200 cash to switch her ticket to me and fly out to Israel three days later (back in the days when such a thing was even possible). My husband Jed and I met – literally and figuratively – on the outer edge of a group of American college students visiting Israel. In the same instant – because we both spoke Hebrew – we realized that the tour guide was lying to the group. We looked up, and started a conversation that continues to today. 

What have I learned from 42 years of marriage?

• A good relationship is steady like an oak, bending down, again and again, to weep like a willow. 

• You can push a relationship beyond the point where it breaks. Yes, you can break it, even, learn from where two separate paths took you, and heal the thing that felt unfixable in the moment of heat and anger. 

• If you lie, you will get caught. If you dare to tell complicated and unfinished truths – things you have not told before – the relationship will continue to unfold and grow. 

Most important, I think, is to know at a very deep level that you cannot change any one or anything but yourself. If you really don’t feel you can love and honor your partner any more – or if they are harming you, intentionally or unintentionally – you should leave, you must leave. 

Everything, every little every thing, changes all the time. An enduring relationship is a place where all those changes can be processed individually and together; where change can be held as the essential, frightening and enlightening thing that it always is. 

Last year, our relationship took in more than I ever thought possible – joy and sadness in rapid succession, beyond what I thought I could endure. I think that is the point of an enduring friendship: its capacity to take in change, to invite change, even to create change so our souls can dance and sing and imagine in all directions all the time. 

Every night, before we go to sleep, we listen to an adaptation of the Hawaiian Ho’oponopono meditation that centers on “I forgive you. I hope you can forgive me too.” As these crazy connections happen, I learned this meditation from one of my Story2 investors, who has become a dear and trusted friend. 

*

Back in the Uber, the driver (I wrote his name down but won’t share it without his permission) asked me, “What do you do?” 

“I teach storytelling,” I said, “but not the way most people think of storytelling – you tell your story and you get more stuff – but storytelling to build community and to heal those intergenerational wounds you were talking about. They often prevent me from listening too.” 

“Oh … oh … well, we’re here,” he said, “we’ll pick this conversation up another time.” And the shiny black car that smelled brand new drove away to its next adventure. 

Writing prompt: What is something in another person that you are trying to change? What is that yearning saying about you? What do you want to change in yourself, leaving the other person to change and tend themself? 

I’m in Chicago for the culmination of Luvvie Ajayi Jones extraordinary six-month Mastermind on Book Marketing. I have not experienced quite this feeling of joyful anticipation since the snowy day I defended my PhD dissertation at Princeton. 

I felt both excited and scared when I was prepping for the Story2 Techstars Demo Day in the fall of 2014, but I felt like an alien in Techstars, like I would never really be one of them (that is a story for another day). The other women on their way to Chicago today for these presentations about our books have become my trusted allies. They have seen me scared and helped me be courageous. I imagine them reading and sharing my book, Story Medicine. 

Luvvie created the conditions for us to succeed, individually and as a group. This is what repair looks like and feels like to me. How does that happen?

• Luvvie teaches from her own experience becoming a best-selling author. If you are a writer and want to become a published author, Luvvie’s Book Academy teaches the tools and process for that shift. 

• Luvvie creates ground rules for the community so people are generous and kind with themselves and one another. 

• Luvvie expects us to do the work. Anything worth doing requires going deep into yourself and sticking with your vision and making it palpable to others. 

• Luvvie makes herself continuously vulnerable in the process of teaching all she has learned through publishing four best-selling books. She shared part of her next book with the Mastermind, taking a pivot inward to reveal more of her own story. I loved watching that liberatory turn towards stories that are deep and painful, told with humor and joy.

• Luvvie designed this Mastermind for people who have books on the road to publication, so we can learn not only from her but from one another and from the process of publication at this inflection point in our lives and careers. On the way to the airport, my driver asked about the other women in this cohort. I felt a bit tingly as I described each of them and why they wrote the books they are publishing. 

• Luvvie focuses on WHY first. I usually resist the question WHY because it’s interpretation, not story, but I’ve come to see how important it is to stay focused on my audience and their needs, not my own. Why should a reader care about my book enough to buy it and share it with other people? 

• Luvvie treats each of our books as a force in the world. Each of us is writing not just for ourselves, but to build a community of actors and change agents. This sense of our collective power is the most important thing I’m taking away from this experience. 

• We are all scared, and we are all pushing through fear. Luvvie has described this in her own journey. That might be her greatest gift of all – to each of us and everyone our books inspire – to know that the pounding in your heart, the twists in your gut, and the lump in your throat are because your writing is important. The world’s on fire, and books provide a way of listening to another person’s voice and spirit and discovering threads of connection to what is real for them – and all of us living beings together. 

• And, the most miraculous part of this group is how we have come to work together in ways that are bigger and bolder than any of us could create alone. For me, it was as if I went in with one sense of myself, mostly hidden, and now I imagine a larger set of possibilities, informed by the other participants’ vision and work. 

This safe space for eight women authors – diverse in so many ways – to be our most vulnerable and courageous selves, is happening in the context of the United States and Israel bombing Iran and Lebanon, with no end in sight. What does it mean for a small group of women authors to focus on expanding the power of our words at such a time? 

I believe deeply that our shared future will be birthed not only by resisting these authoritarian regimes and protecting the people and earth they seek to destroy (we all must resist and protect continuously), but also by creating these small, shared spaces where the group does the work of carrying us, collectively in real time, to that shared future. 

Luvvie’s community became a space of repair for me. When I arrived in Luvvie’s first class, I wasn’t sure I had the stamina to finish and publish this book I’d been working on for more than a decade. The first time I took the hot seat, I tentatively asked Luvvie if I had enough of my proposal written to try to find an agent and publisher. She looked back and forth between my LinkedIn profile and me and said, “You probably know people who can introduce you to agents. You just need to start asking people to make those introductions.” 

Luvvie was right: just a couple weeks later, friends of friends introduced me to their agent. But I still didn’t know how to put my own stories into a book about storytelling that begins with the authority and healing power of stories from each person’s unique lived experience. 

Here’s how the shift happened: Shae asked me about my name and pronouns … and after what felt like a very long silence collapsed in a pool of shame, I sat up, took a breath, and told the story of leaning into my Hebrew name — Chaya, or living being — and pronouns that reflect the many parts of my multiple being after Israel began their devastating attacks on the people, buildings, and cultural institutions of Gaza. Now I lead with that story, awkward and unfinished as it is, 

Repair is not like flipping a switch. Creating a space where diverse people can thrive, individually and together, happens through daily acts of resistance and kindness (the word kind is built on kin, family) and 

Healing begins in community. If we want to topple either-or regimes, we need to tend to them when they show up in our own self-protecting nervous systems. From that place of gently tending our own fears and celebrating our own and others’ wins, we can begin to build communities of compassion and care that extend beyond our usual boundaries to ensure everyone is safe. 

Repair is messy, challenging, and evanescent. Storytelling is a set of muscles we can develop, individually and collectively, to build circles of continuous repair in our everyday lives. That’s why I’m pushing Story Medicine out into the world now: to create, again and again, the place we need to go together in the present. 

Thank you Luvvie, Macy Robison, Aleshia Curry, Sarah Hanson, Khadijah Sharif-Drinkard, Dr. Erica Jordan-Thomas, Shae Primus, Ronnie Dickerson Stewart, Jovian Zayne, and Erica Freeman for all you’ve taught me about repair and especially how community makes repair possible.  

Weekly writing prompt

Where in your life can you take a circle you are already a part of – maybe that’s a parents group, reading group, or prayer circle – and make it safer and more connected than it already is? How is it safe now? Where does it privilege one identity over others? What can you do to make that group of peers with a shared interest safer for everyone by taking in wider and more diverse points of view? 

The spring after my father died – I was 16 and in eleventh grade – I leaned on my Christian friends and that version of Jesus to get through. I remember sitting on the floor of my friend’s basement for Christian bible study before school. I remember the sun rising over Easter morning services on the main lawn at Penn State. I remember visiting Gethsemane the summer after my first year of college and feeling like I was one of those Jewish mystics who felt Jesus rise from his grave and live among them. I imagined myself, so many generations ago, one of those early Jewish people who became Christians. 

The idea that Jesus was not just a prophet, but a human who lived and walked among other humans and loved all of them, forgave all of them, including those who had him hung on the cross to die. I still feel that presence sometimes – not like a divine force, but the best of humanity, something I can yearn to be and become because a son of God had lived among us. “We are all children of the Universe” is how I might have said this at the time.  

*

I realize that this is a very idiosyncratic way of thinking about Jesus; it reminds me of how my grandmother talked about the characters in the Hebrew Bible, as if she had lived amongst them and was speaking from inside a tradition that stretched back to them. It was as if Jesus, the prophet who was also human, protected me from a place that connected the generations and transcended time.  

From the moment my father died until I was in my second year of college, fearing that I had killed my father was one of the secrets I carried with me everywhere I went. In the weeks before my father died, I felt – like a shaking just below my skin – that if I loved my father enough, I could keep him alive; that it was my job to tend to him through his illness and somehow, magically, he would walk out alive. It sounds crazy as I write this now, but that was one of many excruciating secrets I kept hidden when I went away to college and for many years afterwards. 

When I felt guilty beyond what I could carry alone, I thought of Jesus forgiving me. Because he had been human, and had forgiven so many people who had done so many bad things, Jesus embodied this kind of forgiveness that I wanted so desperately but could not give to myself. 

*

Many years later, when I discovered EMDR and then storytelling, and I began to talk about those childhood secrets, I made a choice to forgive other people so I could begin healing my complex PTSD. I needed to put these traumas in the past in order to heal the wounds where I carried them for so long. 

I wrote to the perpetrator and said I forgave him. 

I told my mother several times over the years, but it was not something she was able to take in as real until I was helping her to complete her own life story, and when we had the opening to sit with the reality together we both took it. In Japanese tradition, when an important vessel is broken, you repair it with precious metals, so the cracks show in the new vessel. This is called kintsugi, or golden repair. It was like a “golden repair” in my relationship with my mother when we sat together with what had happened to me so long ago, and her refusal to accept that it was true for so long. 

That fragile, visible repair of a broken relationship is at the heart of what Jewish tradition calls tikkun olam, or repairing the world. It all starts with one human looking at another and acknowledging how they have actively caused harm, and making a commitment to change. Circle practice works like this as well – if you cause harm, even when inadvertent, you start with the other person’s feelings, acknowledging what you have done that caused them harm.

When my perpetrator said, “I WAS WRONG. I apologize. I am sorry,” it began a deep, clearing in my spirit at a place I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t know I’d been harmed there because I’d never been there. When the first couple of people asked me, “How do you feel?” I honestly didn’t know. Or I couldn’t put it in words. I felt the need to experience and process this shift for myself before I could even approach, much less answer that question. 

I am just beginning to go into that place and soothe myself now, five months after he wrote, “I WAS WRONG. I apologize. I’m sorry.” Forgiving someone is big and healing; that person acknowledging their wrongdoing is healing and cleansing in a completely different way. One is not better or worse; they are both necessary. 

When he acknowledged what he had done, what I had left was the need to forgive myself and love myself as whole and worthy once again. I’m not sure how much others experience this, but forgiving myself for all the places I’ve not honored myself and taken responsibility for myself, this is one of the hardest things I’ve had to face since my mother passed. With her gone from this world, there is no one but myself I can lean on when I am complicit in things that are wrong, when I stand back rather than trying what I know is imperfect but must be done anyway. 

I’ve been going back in time in my daily writing, noticing moments when I didn’t trust myself or believe myself or love myself, and I’m tending, soothing, and repairing those messy places one by one. It makes me a little shaky sometimes to feel this responsibility – not right or wrong, just responsible for myself and everything I do and have ever done. 

Writing prompt:

What is something that you could forgive yourself for? It could be something big or small, something you did or failed to do, once or many times. What do you need to do to forgive yourself in the present now?

All the energy drained from my friend’s face. She put her hand on mine and told me her story, which is different from mine in many ways, but these details are structurally the same:

• The pain of repeated violation. 
• The perpetrator being someone who was known and close to her family.  
• When she told her mother, her mother did not take her side. 
• And, much later, close to the end of our mothers’ lives, each of us had a reckoning of sorts with our mothers about not helping us at the time. 

Jeffrey Epstein was in the news that day, and I’d been thinking about the role Ghislaine Maxwell and other affluent white women played in finding young girls to serve Epstein and his male colleagues and friends. As Molly Jong-Fast and others – including the girls themselves – have described, the girls were almost an afterthought to the Justice Department. It was as if images of the girls – and the girls themselves – remain a currency exchanged among powerful elites, as if they still do not have voice and agency for themselves. 

“I feel like we were both trafficked,” I said to my friend. “It takes so many people denying what is right in front of them for these crimes to happen again and again.” We sat talking for more than an hour. When I got up to leave, the sky was dark; streetlights reflected off recently fallen snow. Opening my car door, I noticed that someone had clipped the mirror off the driver’s side. 

***

A week ago, we went out to brunch, and I told her I was trying to write about our conversation. I was taking a bite of a stringy grilled cheese when she said, “I don’t think it’s right to say we were trafficked. When I hear that word I think of something much worse. I think of people being taken against their will, taken across borders, maybe even sold into sexual submission.” 

Since then I’ve felt that it’s both dangerously imprecise and directionally useful to think about the many instances – as many as one in four children is sexually abused before the age of 18 – in which a child is touched against their will and the people who should be stopping it know that it’s happening and do nothing. 

When I first started writing about my own experience, over 15 years ago, many friends from high school shared their own, similar stories. 

I think of my own mother who – when she finally sat quietly and listened to what I’d tried so many times to tell her – wanted to run out and “do something.” 

That’s how storytelling works … it’s as if you are there with the person who tells their story. The past comes to life in the present, and you remember, in your body, similar things that have happened to you or that you have seen happen to others. Mirror neurons in our brains allow us to feel empathy and compassion for the person who shares their story in simple, honest words. 

It takes a tremendous amount of denial, cover-up, and treating young men and women as if they are not fully human, for this process to go on. Every time another trove of Epstein papers is about to drop, the MAGA machine goes into full dissembling mode, trying to make us not see what is right before our eyes, again and again. 

When my perpetrator apologized, after so many years, my sense of who I was sat atop this wobbly edifice of my family’s and community’s denial. It was only when I read about the crimes committed against young girls by Epstein and his powerful cronies that I saw how our system of privilege and entitlement holds up a whole range of atrocities, from groping and touching on the school bus, to sexually charged jokes at work, to the crime of trafficking human beings from one place to another for use by someone who pays to abuse them. 

Who I am now is a person who speaks up even when it feels like everyone they know won’t listen. I am the person who listens when your sense of who you are is crumbling, and you are ready to tear it down to repair yourself and others who have felt the shame and loneliness of holding a terrible truth on our own. 

What is something in your own life that is linked to larger structures of domination and control? If you think about what happened to you in relation to these larger, repeated patterns, what shifts in your thoughts, feelings, and words to describe what happened to you?

We are entering a Year of the Fire Horse – the last one of these was 1966 – anticipate fast, hot changes, revolutions in thought and possibility, often several at once. You won’t be able to control time, so don’t even try. May you be courageous enough to run with the horses when you feel fire in your belly, and get out of other horses’ way when you need to pause to rest before moving forward again. 

Remember: in these fast times, our learning shifts quickly too, so I invite you to be willing to try new things, make new friends, and make mistakes on your way to new places you are destined to explore this year. 

Get ready to celebrate, fast then feast then fast again, and look deeply into what you can do and change! 

In 2026 I’m focused on growing the Storyhood® online community.

One of the key roles in every community is the storyteller, the person who bridges between groups and creates a shared sense of purpose and vision for the future – this is especially important for people who want to build a future that is more equitable than the way our country is organized now. 

People describe Alex Pretti as both an observer and storyteller of what he saw happening on the ground in Minneapolis. The storyteller connects people across fault lines through the brain’s love of stories. 

Whether you want to write more about what’s happening, or speak out at public meetings and demonstrations, or take in what you see and read without being completely flooded, Storyhood is for you. Even when the content is frightening, stories enable us to share what is real all around us and figure out how to work together for change. In Storyhood we teach simple tools to build sustainable communities through our brains’ shared love of stories. Stories about meals, relationships, work, play … everyday things we share as human beings. 

Storyhood is a community built on storytelling. Storyhood combines the neuroscience of storytelling with ancient practices that use storytelling as a way to build and maintain community across times, places, and generations.

Our intention is to create a space that is both edgy and safe enough for you to tell stories you don’t usually tell out loud and to learn from others’ most powerful and vulnerable stories. The circle process builds a space where you can explore your own stories side-by-side with others whose stories are different and, often in surprising ways, similar to yours.

What do I mean by Resistance Storytelling? Using your brain’s innate storytelling ability to speak up for yourself and your communities; to create enduring connections with people from different backgrounds; and to build a future where everyone’s voice and stories are heard.

To build those sustainable communities we imagine two new offerings:

• A free, monthly community storytelling circle
• A program to train 6-8 new Storytelling & Repair circle-keepers. Our idea is that these folks will get really steady in their own storytelling – both the content and process of sharing stories at the intersections between communities, projects, and generations – and create their own courses over the year. If you think you might be a good fit, please let us know, so we can add you to that group mailing list. 

I invite you to join us at these new, shared watering holes in the year of the Fire Horse and to bring your friends and colleagues who want to experience the healing power of others’ stories, while tending and sharing their own. 

May the fires of love and compassion burn bright for you and all people this year. 

The most important thing I am doing this year is building out the sustainable storytelling community we discovered during COVID and named Storyhood®. What is the most important thing you are building this year? When you are hugely successful what will be possible for all people?

He emailed my sister saying he wanted to attend the celebration of my mother’s life, and she asked me what I wanted to do. “Let me think about it,” I said, pausing to ask myself that question overnight.  

I had forgiven him — and everyone else who knew and did nothing — over fifteen years ago, as part of the healing that began as I started telling stories from my past out loud for the first time. 

I wondered, “What does my apology mean now? What do I want to do now?” 

As soon as I gave myself that space, I felt – in the trembling just under my skin – that I wanted to be unencumbered by his physical presence. I didn’t want to be triggered. Most of all, I didn’t want my children or grandchildren to see him or experience his energy. 

***

It had taken me years to remember, face, and process what had happened the summer after third grade, and all the varieties of torture that older boy had subjected me to when I was a young girl. 

As I began to remember — the summer I took my first Women’s Studies classes and worked doing child care at the New Haven Project for Battered Women — I went to see him when I was home visiting my mother. I was wearing overalls and one of my father’s drab green t-shirts from the Marines, almost like my father was there protecting me.

He opened the door, I walked in just a few steps, and said, “I’m not sure exactly what you did to me, but it wasn’t right.” He started to flirt with me, and reached out – first to touch me, like I was his pet, and then to pull me into his space. “No,” I screamed very loud, as I left, banging the door behind me and running down the stairs. 

Driving back to my mother’s house, I composed my face and feelings. My face twitches as I remember my audacity and his sense of entitlement that day. 

***

When my first daughter was a year old, I remembered the whole thing. Not all at once and not all the details, but in sharp thin edges that crept up through my everyday life — acute pain in my gut that radiated across my chest and up to my throat — and in vivid dreams, night after night, that part of my past demanded my full attention. 

A friend recommended a social worker who helped women that had been sexually harmed as children. I spent over a year, on my back on her couch, three days a week, remembering. I’m not sure if psychoanalysis was the standard of care – or if there even was a standard of care – at that time; it certainly is not considered the best treatment now for PTSD.

Though it didn’t help with my healing – that process began with EMDR years later – it did require me to recreate the scene of the first attack, and the various acts of harassment, humiliation, and physical harm that led up to sexual violation and never fully stopped until I left home for college. 

When I told my sister what I was remembering, and asked her if she had any similar memories, she said, “It might have happened, but I didn’t see anything.”

The next day, when I told my mother, she said, “It was so long ago. You don’t want to do anything now do you?” Up until that moment, I had naively thought that my mother didn’t understand or didn’t have words for what happened to me when I was a child, or that maybe my mother didn’t understand what I was trying to tell her or that maybe my five-year-old sister was too young to even know. 

But they knew, all along they knew. My mother and I didn’t talk about my experience until much later, when I was helping her write her memoir and we had become able to talk about hard things – things we had experienced differently when they happened. That was the first time I felt she really grasped the enormity of that sexual attack on my life ever since. She jumped up. “Mom, where are you going?” I asked.

“I have to go do something about it,” she said. 

“Mom, I’ve already forgiven him, you, everyone. Please just stay here and sit with it.” And she sat back down. I wish I had asked her what was driving her to “do something” that morning. What she imagined she would do. At the time, I was content that she was just sitting with me and the long ago event that had shaped my identity as a girl, woman, and mother. It was as if the past sat between us, untouched and unvoiced. I missed my chance to explore what it meant to her when I was a young girl, and she was a wife and mother in her early thirties. 

*** 

I asked my sister for his email address, and I wrote asking him not to come. He said he would not come, adding a PS: “When you wrote to me I wasn’t sure what to say. It was a long time ago. I was young. I WAS WRONG. I apologize.” 

He was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. I was eight. He lived in our neighborhood; his parents were my parents’ close friends and colleagues, much wealthier and more influential than we were. I had often thought over the years about how nasty his father was, how loud and cruel he became when his face got red from drinking. I knew my abuser was also abused; that’s a big part of what allowed me to forgive him. 

After he apologized, I told a few people the story. Most did not get how big the absence of an acknowledgement had been in my sense of who I was. After the initial shock passed, I was surprised how light I felt. All my years of shame and hiding – and my mother’s and sister’s gaslighting me, as if there was something emotionally wrong with me – it all shifted and floated back into the past.  

I wonder what my life would look like, who I might be, if there had been a process of apology and repair when I was a little girl? I also wonder if my mother was sexually or physically harmed as a child? Or did she see other women being harmed? The apology, the shift made it no longer just my problem, but a community disease, still rampant, that had happened to me and through me long ago. 

There was one person I told my story to who had a similar experience. I will tell that story next week. 

If you or someone you know have been harmed, you can access confidential help at National Alliance on Mental Illness.

What is something painful that happened to you in the past that you do not usually talk about? What do you imagine might happen if you forgave your perpetrator, yourself, and the community for enabling that violation to take place?

“I feel like it’s all too much …” is what I think I said, rolling my eyes and moving into a creaky down dog. 

“At so many levels …” is what she definitely said, then six of us laughed at once. The next hour, people quoted her when our discussions of everyday life veered off or felt off because … fascism is not fun. I almost wrote, “None of us had lived through this before.” And then my brain added, “not in this life.” And then I remembered my Black friends saying, “We never stopped living this. We are always afraid of being picked up and killed for nothing we did except showing up Black.”

Some of my elders were Holocaust survivors. They remembered times like this, and certainly generations past, again and again … but not me, not in these bones and muscles I make stronger twice a week at Move Well, our wonderful local gym. But I do remember … 

For me, 2025 started in the fall of 2024, before the election, when I gave myself a weeklong course at Kripalu with gurus of healing from PTSD. The person I most wanted to meet in person was Gabor Maté, co-author (with his son) of The Myth of Normal. If you don’t know Gabor Maté, you can get a great introduction to how he views the world in this interview with Mel Robbins. 

Gabor first made it onto my radar in the early days of the pandemic, in a webinar about healing generational trauma that was sponsored by a variety of progressive Jewish organizations. By the time I met him in person, Hamas had invaded Israel, and Israel had retaliated with relentless displacing, starving, and killing of Gazan citizens.  

I can barely keep my stomach settled when I type those words, now more than two years into that war, with no real end in sight, even though the US and Israeli governments are calling what is now in place a “ceasefire” and the UN seems to be submitting to that lie. 

I went to Kripalu to connect with Gabor and tell him about my idea for creating the emotional and communal infrastructure for individual and collective repair from so many generations of killing and trauma. When it was time for questions, I got in line at the side of the room. I thanked Gabor for speaking out for the Palestinian people and then said, “You yourself do this, but have you thought about connecting the work you do helping individuals to heal with the work of systemic change?” 

Gabor looked right at me and asked, “Do you feel this is your life’s work, what you are here to do?” 

“Yes”, I said, feeling so young and vulnerable that I peed my pants a little. That tiny exchange set up everything that shifted inside me in relation to storytelling in 2025 … it changed how I think about many things and how I act … on so many levels. 

When I look back at 2025, inside my own body and observing through the lens of healing my own traumas, in the context of responding to big systemic challenges – racism, misogyny, relentless multi-generational war, the planet on fire – a cluster of feelings shows up at once: sadness, and below the sadness, profound grief; feeling alone, unsettled, and powerless. It is as if all my life I have tried to hide that cluster of feelings, and the shame that surrounds them, running fast to keep them at bay. That running and shame took on a life of their own when I was very young … so young I cannot remember a time before that feeling of running and shame. 

When I first became aware of this pattern of shame rather than resistance in the face of power – and how deeply it was rooted in my default responses to so many things, at so many levels – in the fall of 2008, I started a daily practice of meditating, storytelling, and writing to begin to face the things that frightened me in myself and the world around me. I call that daily practice Story Asana. 

Out of that daily practice I created the Moments Method® of storytelling and launched Story2, a Techstars funded EdTech business that taught over a quarter million high school and college students, and hundreds of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and everyday people, how to tell their own stories out loud. 

During COVID, I started Storyhood®, a community built on storytelling, and in 2025 I imbibed diverse community experiences to help me put my personal storytelling practice in a larger frame. Those community practices include: 

• Rev angel Kyodo williams’ No Big Deal Sit and the Healing Race Portal, led by Rev angel with Resmaa Menakem. 
• I took Gabor’s one-day course and found a movie about Gabor directed by Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo, and was present for the online launch of The Eternal Song, their celebration of indigenous stories and healing around the world.  For anyone – like me – who wants to connect with their deepest, truest ways of knowing, and who wants to learn the stories of the diverse indigenous cultures Europeans tried to erase around the world, The Eternal Song project – 11 films and extended conversations with indigenous wisdom-keepers and community leaders – is the place to begin. 
• And feeling that I could finally write the book my father talked about when I was sixteen and he was dying – but I could not market my own writing – I joined Luvvie Ajayi Jones Book Academy and then her Bestselling Book Mastermind.  

All of these encounters, and ongoing conversations with other members of those communities, draw me closer to where I want to be: comfortable in my own dry skin, able to sit with the mess of my childhood, and love everyone exactly as they are, as an observer for many generations backwards and forwards. 

That journey to the deepest, most multi-faceted version of my own story happened in the context of many big events in my personal life: 

• In February my husband Jed was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia (LBD) and we began our journey through both the science and spirit of living with an incurable illness, without giving ourselves over to the medical-industrial complex as if something is wrong. 
• Over the summer two of my children had new children. For me, #GrandmotherToTheWorld, this is huge. Everything surrounding one of my daughter’s giving birth to a daughter deserves a lot more writing over time.  
• In September, my mother – the indomitable Mimi – passed, and we buried her beside my father in the Jewish cemetery they helped to establish years ago between State College and Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. 
• In November, we remembered Mimi with a public celebration of her life in State College, and the boy who assaulted me when I was eight said, “I was wrong. I apologize.” I am writing about that in a coming newsletter.  
• And over the course of the year, I went deep into my old life as a professor and faculty advisor to the Rutgers Admissions office to help two Gazan refugees navigate the college process. 

I originally wrote this letter in December, with the energy of the Solstice and Hanukkah, the season of light out of darkness, everyday miracles wrought from faith. Honoring our intense, outcast ancestors, who somehow kept loving through chaotic times, Jed and I take in refugees, including lost parts of ourselves; we rise in gratitude, find new friends and new learning each day, and meditate on forgiveness last thing every night. 

What are the stories that shaped you in 2025? What is the most important thing you are taking into 2026, this Lunar Year of the Fire Horse?

Most of our trip through Germany, the Czech Republic, and Austria, I did not write. Jed and I wrote back and forth in that new journal I bought in the paper shop on Winterfeldstrasse, but I did not do the kind of daily writing or writing for the world I usually do, and I did not do any writing towards Story Medicine, though I thought about it a lot. Right now, on the flight home, I am trying to remember as much as I can of the profound shifts that happened while I was away. I would call them grief – about my mother and about Jed and about Gaza and the whole sweep of human history that makes annihilating other humans possible. 

Something shifted in me while we traveled and I’m trying to reconstruct it here in a way that might make sense to other people:

September 29

We flew to Berlin. I was extremely frightened, clinging to Jed in the airport as if I might lose him. As if he was a child who couldn’t care for himself. I slept on the plane, arrived a bit whippy from the time change but rested enough. We made it through immigration, got our luggage, and then a taxi, and headed to our rented apartment on the inviting, tree-lined street we call home in Berlin. 

September 30 

There is a thing happening across the colonial world, where Jews are being othered and targeted. At the same time, Israel – the Jewish state – is mass murdering Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. At that point of our trip, Trump had not yet forced the ceasefire through. I felt an exhaustion from the fighting; I was not able to awaken my own strong feelings. I could see them in Palestinian refugees in my community, and I could respond by tending them, but I was no longer feeling my normal outrage – or anything really – in my own body.

October 2 

We went to Kol Nidre services at the Reform Synagogue in Berlin. I had a sense on the subway and as we walked through the air smelling of autumn that there was great danger in that choice. Jed and I looked at one another, as if he felt it too, and yet we walked in and listened to tunes that sounded just like my childhood synagogue, when my family went just a couple times a year and Kol Nidre was one of those times. 

Kol Nidre is an odd service in so many ways – it has a completely unique hymn; the words are Aramaic, not Hebrew; and it is framed as a legal proclamation, as if you are sitting in court. Instead of English, there was German translation, but otherwise it was very much as I remembered Kol Nidre services as a child. Here we were in Berlin, on the holiest of Jewish days, praying with Jews in a place where the eradication of Jews had been attempted and a great deal of the plan acted out.

I had a very strong feeling of survival. I was crying, just behind my eyes, but the tears did not come out. I was remembering my father, my mother, my grandparents. This was not the Jewish congregation I would choose, if I were choosing from all the different places I’ve said Jewish prayers, but it moved me in a way I had not experienced in a very long time – a feeling I would describe as both longing and the absence of longing, a kind of multi-generational enduring I had not felt in exactly this way before.

The next day my son-in-law told us that it had been reported in the German news – though it didn’t make the news in the U.S. – that there had been a bomb threat that night, and security was high at all the Jewish sites throughout Germany. I had felt that, before he told us: the danger of congregating as Jews. And the next day a synagogue was targeted in Manchester, England and several people killed. 

October Full Moon – Berlin

Jed and I did the full moon Movement for the Movement with Kerri Kelly, an online community exploration combining music, meditation, and dance. Jed said he experienced a lessening of his physical tightness and fear. The opening was palpable, and I flowed into that. Where, I wonder, can we find more of that for him, and for the two of us to do together? I remembered the time, dancing at a party in Jed’s fraternity when we were in college, where my entire life felt formulaic and contrived, like my heart could not dance. This is the top of Jed’s vision: things we dare to do because our choices are constrained and therefore limitless. 

After Kerri’s community class, we went to the neighborhood Italian restaurant for dinner – and they remembered us. We split a mushroom pizza and half a liter of the house Primitivo and walked home in the moonlight. 

Usually I am put off when authors use excerpts from their journals to describe their inner landscape – even Michelle Obama, in her otherwise delightful memoir Becoming, seemed unable to make that succeed. I’m wondering if I was able to get to something new – for anyone other than myself – in those journal snippets just above here?

I invite you to think of a day – or series of days – when your ordinary experience shifted to another plane. What shifted, specifically? What is a memory that suggests your default way of thinking before the shift? What is a simple daily detail that lets you know a shift has occurred?

It was a very peaceful dream. It took place in a large art installation in nature, (reminiscent of the Dana Milbank article about being in touch with nature and his brother on the Appalachian Trail). Maybe it was also inspired by our walks: noticing shrubs changing, new flowers, colors. It was an outdoor installation that provided different perspectives over time and space. I was standing at the base, and then the top of a crest; there were multiple changing lights and the dimensionality of time. I experienced [my] perspective changing from moment to moment; there are many ways to contribute and all are true.

When Jed described this dream to the therapist who is helping us navigate his illness as a couple, Jed resisted the thing that both the therapist and I had experienced: that this is a vision of illness as illumination, as a different way of knowing that most people have little access to. 

She and I both thought of Jed’s vision as a way to bust out of what Gabor Mate describes in The Myth of Normal: all the ways we are trained from early childhood (and prior generations) to silence our unique visions and try to make ourselves like others and to live in service to others’ needs and their ideas of who we should be.  

Over the coming weeks, Jed and I came to see that our life right now includes many vantage points, and they are all shifting all the time. 

The builder in me wanted to create a place in nature where Jed’s multiple vantage points could manifest! Jed didn’t think of his vision as having meaning outside of his illness. Perhaps the first impulse of a reasonable person is to resist prophecy, as each of us did in our own ways. Perhaps prophecy is always there, just beyond what we usually experience, and from time to time we are given the chance to welcome it in. 

Can you remember a moment when you saw something in a way that felt markedly different from other people – and bigger than your everyday self? Slow down and describe what you saw. Was anyone else there? Did you tell them or anyone else? What would happen if you shared the vision with that person and other people today?