News — Starting Over
The Evolution of a Gym Rat: Instagram Envy, and How I Made Fitness A Top Priority
Posted by Lisa Johnson on
Under the guise of business, I began dipping into the waters of Instagram for the past year, and observed that anyone with posts related to exercise, workouts or hard bodies, seems to get LOADS of likes. Why do people pay so much attention to everyone else’s progress? Is it really motivating to see how far others have succeeded? In elementary school, I was a gymnast. My best friend used to tease me because I wore sweatpants to school four days a week, and owned one pair of patchwork dungarees with a parrot on back pocket (boy, do I wish...
- 0 comment
- Tags: Affirmation, Agility, Back Injury, Can Do, Capable, Cardio, Celebrate Life, Childhood, Connecting, Dance, Dance Party, Endurance, Envy, Family Life, Feel Good, Fitness, Friendship, Good Idea, Gym Rate, Gymnastics, Happiness, Healing, Health, Health and Wellness, Injury, Instagram, Middle Age Life, New Friends, New Year's Resolution, Parenthood, Physical Therapy, Power, Priority, Recovery, Self-Help, Share your Story, Social Activity, Social Media, Starting Over, Strength, Treating Oneself, Womens Health, Workout, YMCA
What Gets Us Through: Trauma and the Importance of Physical Strength in Healing
Posted by Lisa Johnson on
After nearly eighteen years of a fairly stable relationship, I learned that my husband had begun an affair with a girl thirty years his junior. Stunning for anyone, yes, but more so was that my partner, whose judgment I had always respected, confessed that he and the girl had actually never met. Several sites linking her to German porn made no difference; he was convinced she was his soulmate and promised to marry her within two weeks of their email correspondence. A few months into the rocky navigation of all attempts to save a doomed marriage, my son's best friend shot himself in the head...
- 0 comment
- Tags: Adolescent Boy, Back Injury, Bullying, Can Do, Capable, Catfish, Celebrate Life, Conflict Resolution, Connection, Dance, Delusion, Denial, Dissolution of Long-Term Marriage, Divorce, Divorce and Children, Endurance, Expert Advice, Family, Feel Good, Fitness, Friendship, Good Idea, Gym, Happiness, Healing, Hip Hop, Love, Motherhood, Moving Out, Narcissist, Parenting, Physical Strength, Physical Therapy, PTSD, Reclaim, Recovery, Relationships, Resilience, Self-Help, Separation, Sex Addiction, Starting Over, Strength, Suicide, Tough Life Decisions, Trauma, Trust, Womens Issues, Workout, YMCA
Dealing With Difficult People: Forgiveness in Unexpected Ways
Posted by Lisa Johnson on
When you are someone who manages to get along with practically everyone, it’s unnerving to meet a person that you just can’t seem to budge. The other day, a good friend and I were having lunch in a local cafe, and the subject of dealing with impossible people came up. A couple of years earlier, she’d had a fluke accident after her Rhodesian Ridgeback dog had spotted a deer in the backyard, lunged at it, and dragged my friend along with her. Sylvia ended up with a broken hip, and in the hospital and rehab for months. During her stay,...
- 0 comment
- Tags: Capable, Community Building, Conflict Resolution, Connection, Forgiveness, Friendship, Health and Wellness, Middle Age Life, Relationships, Resilience, Self-Help, Self-Sufficient, Starting Over, Strength, Womens Issues
How To Marry the Wrong Person: The Power of Underestimating Oneself
Posted by Lisa Johnson on
Date someone after you've been out of the country for a year and starved for intellectual companionship. Even though he's kind of dumpy, wears the same pair of too-tight black Levis for weeks on end, and sports a hairpiece at the age of 30, convince yourself that he’s attractive enough. When you first take a shower at his house, ask for a towel. When he gives you a shredded orange rag from the floor of his closet, pretend that it’s funny. Ditto for the t-shirt covered with dog fur. Pretend the pyramid of dirty tissues you find is amusing...
- 0 comment
- Tags: Affirmation, Can Do, Denial, Dissolution of Long-Term Marriage, Divorce, Divorce and Children, Hope, Men's Life, Mothering, Narcissist, Reclaim, Self-Help, Separation, Split, Starting Over, Strength, Womens Issues
Best First Kiss - From The Guy's Point of View (Part 2)
Posted by Michael Barry on
I found myself (not so) suddenly single – technically, “without a partner” is more accurate – in the summer of 2014. Those who have gone through something similar know about all of the stress that goes along with a rather ugly end to a marriage that lasted more than a decade. It was a deep shock to my system, without question the worst thing I had ever had to deal with in my life, though I would soon come to see that it was better than continuing to struggle in a relationship that had become severely toxic. I was...
- 2 comments
- Tags: Best Kiss, Dating, Divorce, Finding New Love, Hope, Knock Your Socks Off, Lover, Magic, Men's Life, Middle Age Life, Midlife Romance, Power, Reclaim, Romance, Self-Help, Separation, Soulmate, Starting Over, Strength, Valentine's Day