life story

Blogtalk: Memory and Moments

April 15, 2011

Yesterday, Shirley Hershey Showalter shared a fascinating TED video (re-posted below) on her blog 100 Memoirs. The video, a talk by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, is about the difference between what he calls the “experiencing self” (that part of us that experiences life moment by moment) and the “memory self” (that part of us that [...]

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A Week’s Worth of Journaling Prompts: What’s Your Story?

April 4, 2011
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It happens all the time. Someone says, “Tell me a little about yourself,” or asks, “What do you do?” or I’m asked to introduce myself to a group, so I grab a piece of my history, mix it with a bit of now, and spin a tale for my audience. The protagonist is always me [...]

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Journaling the Sensory Details: Touch

September 14, 2010
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THINK for a moment about the sense of touch (the ability to feel temperature, pressure, vibration, and texture) and how much it affects our lives. Now ask yourself, how much of your journal or memoir writing includes the wonderful details this sense offers us? If you’re like me, we don’t always include a lot of [...]

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Making Meaning Through Journal Writing: Rewriting Our Stories

September 7, 2010
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MOST PEOPLE carry some form of story around with then. When someone asks who we are, we recite what we do for a living, the roles we play (mother, daughter, husband, father, son, caregiver). And when we tell the stories of our lives, we repeat the things we’ve decided are our truths. Perhaps we were [...]

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Why Write? Clarity

July 13, 2010
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WRITING THROUGH TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY clarifies perspective and strengthens decision-making skills. We all have times of change in our lives, times when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, when the future seems to be engulfed by a vague, gray fog, inaccessible and maddeningly disconcerting. When confusion seems to reign, and you aren’t sure [...]

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Making Meaning: Creating a Positive Spin

June 29, 2010
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AS I WAS LYING ON MY BACK this morning, groaning through one of my yoga stretches, I was thinking about the journal entry I wrote earlier. I had, in the spirit of my weekly Journaling Through Life E-zine, written an entry using one of this week’s writing prompts. The topic was Time, and the prompt [...]

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