Welcome to Story Medicine, my newsletter for the Storyhood® community. Each week, I share something new – a lesson I learned, an idea I wrestled, or something perplexing I just found – plus a story prompt for you to explore in your own voice.
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Storytelling as a Practice
New to Story Medicine? Start with this foundational piece on what storytelling as a practice really means.
#24: Selling my wedding dress
Last week, I sold some of my mom’s chunky jewelry and dropped off my vintage wedding dress to be sold online. “It’s a good karma dress,” I wrote in the notes, imagining someone else laughing in it, dancing in it, feeling themselves elevated and down to earth at once. Looking back, I don’t feel like…
#23: The miraculous in everyday life
One day, now decades ago, I said – out loud to myself – “you know, Carol (that was the name I called myself then) everyone you meet is here for a reason. Your job is to figure out what that reason is.” It felt like something my father might say, both simple and oracular, possible…
#22: What does repair look like?
March 7, 2026 | Chicago 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…
#21: What does it mean to forgive ourselves?
When I imagine taking the best parts of all the world’s religions and making one vessel that holds all that is ideal in each of them, I think of Jesus as the exemplar of human forgiveness. The spring after my father died – I was 16 and in eleventh grade – I leaned on my…
#20: “We were trafficked…”
My friend was visiting town for Thanksgiving. I was sitting on her couch, as the sun set, when I told her the story I’ve told you … I talked not so much about the violation years ago, but how he had remained a friend of my mother’s, and I had asked him not to come…
#19: What is Resistance Storytelling?
February 17 marks the beginning of the Lunar New Year, the start of Ramadan, and Mardi Gras, the masquerade just before Lent in Christian tradition. The Jewish festival of Purim, on which Mardi Gras is based, follows on March 2. We are entering a Year of the Fire Horse – the last one of these…
#18: After 58 years he apologized …
Trigger warning sexual harm; complex PTSD. 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…
#17: “At so many levels … ”
Last week at the gym, my friend Jenna asked, “So how are you?” “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…
#16: How do we talk about when feelings change?
October 18, 2025 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,…
#15: Dementia is a different way of knowing
Jed woke up and described his dream: 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,…
#14: The miracle of walking in a foreign landscape
Last time, I wrote about the day my husband Jed’s body started to shake. In this upcoming week that includes the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, I am meditating on the holiday’s insistence that our community’s faith creates miracles out of the most profound everyday constraints. October 2024 I insisted Jed go back to the neurologist…
#13: A day my marriage changed in an afternoon
I felt a surge in the energy running through my body. Questions that had been emerging for several years came together and made sense in a moment. My knowing shifted, but not in a rational or intellectual way. And not just the content of the knowing shifted, but the vessel — my way of knowing…
#12: The space of the mother(s)
Berlin 2025 I’ve been reading Daniel Foor, Ancestral Medicine, and watching Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s course, Hospicing Modernity, on the Science and Nonduality website. That combination, and living for three weeks in a city not my home, has opened up a lot of thinking about my maternal line. The words “space of the mother” have…
#11: Hard lessons from my mother … that are very hard to shift
In my last newsletter, I focused on some of the important lessons my mother passed down to me. This week, I am looking at some of the hard lessons that caused me harm growing up. I often think the most important things we learn from our closest family and friends are the things they are…
#10: 3 enduring lessons from my badass mother dying
The most important lessons my mother taught me are the ones she wanted the world to take away from her memoir and her life. Eat First, Cry Later was her first-generation college alumna version of “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”; “put your own oxygen mask on first,” and “never, ever, ever give up”…
#9: Sitting with awkwardness
[Content warning: SA will be mentioned] More than three weeks ago, I received a terse email from my brother-in-law to me and my cousins saying that one of my mother’s hospice nurses had said she could die any day. The physical pain of the rupture between me and my sister coursed from my brain to…
#8: Get intimate with what you do not yet know…
A week ago, very early Saturday morning, I looked out the window and saw a shimmering arch in the backyard. For a second, I wasn’t sure if I was having a vision or a hallucination. As the archway faded in and out, I saw how the lights from the front of the house worked their…
#7: What does it mean to call myself Grandmother to the World?
I had two amazing grandmothers … and I will write about them and their influence on me in due time … This week I want to explore what it means to me to call myself “grandmother to the world.” The first time this exploded into the present for me was right after Hamas invaded Israel…
#6: Aunty Carol enters the world fully expressed
Here is the blog I wrote to introduce Aunty Carol to the World in the fall of 2020 This is who I am. I’m sitting on the living room floor, red coffee cup from a French restaurant overlooking the Forbidden City and headphones to my right, iPhone with a flowery case to my left, laptop…
#5: Who is Aunty Carol?
One of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me was from Kerri Kelly, author of the fabulous book, American Detox. “Don’t give people advice unless they ask for it,” she said, shaking her head no and walking me back from the ledge of having given someone I look up to as a mentor…
#4: What do we mean by “accountability?”
At the beginning of 2025, I made a commitment to finish and publish the book I had been writing about storytelling and healing. I signed up Luvvie Ajayi Jones’ Book Academy to make me accountable for finishing it this calendar year. Luvvie’s course and community are extremely powerful and generous, and I strongly recommend The…
#3: Sitting in the same place, but everything is different …
I feel like every spring there is a day when the colors in my neighborhood are so vibrant I want to dance … and then, a week later or so, it vanishes … After I recorded this video last month, I started meditating on how each of those spring days is really unique, how it’s…
#2: Who is someone important you almost never met?
Last week, my husband Jed and I were at a dinner honoring Dune Thorne, Congresswoman Sarah McBride, Kristen Caskey, Adrienne Warren and the Women’s Project Theater. One of the questions that often shows up when you’re meeting new people is “how did you meet?” “I wasn’t supposed to be there when I met Jed …”…
#1: Ask the Universe for something more you can do …
“Someday you must tell me,” my friend texts, “to whom I owe thanks for introducing us to one another.” And so I answered … “The Universe connected us. “ Here’s what happened … I was writing about Gaza and working through a lot of childhood beliefs that didn’t serve me as an adult in the…