I've spent a great deal of time on this blog talking about rituals--those humble, self-created ceremonies I intentionally build into my daily routine for the purpose of enhancing my life. For making me feel more alive, more deeply connected to the world around me, and more firmly rooted in myself. These rituals, which are little [...]
I Am TheUsedLife.
I rather enjoy being an anonymous blogger. Aside from the tiny handful of you who know me in real life and the one or two other bloggers to whom I have divulged my first name, no one knows me. I am the woman behind the experiment. Writing from somewhere, usually, in the United States. The [...]
Means & Ends
My parents divorced when I was in my teens. My father decided to remarry when I was in my twenties, which means that I, an only child for the duration of my childhood, now have a much younger, teenage stepbrother. He is a cool kid, although admittedly, I don't see him as often as I [...]
The One-Two
It never occurred to me that the personal-growth-related phenomena I have spent so much time learning and writing about here on The Used Life may, in fact, have part of their origins in perception (of all things). Indeed, it wasn’t until I began reading Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being, only late last week, [...]
In Creative Combination
There are moments in which I believe I exist within tightly defined limits. Moments in which I am conscious that I must expand my conception of myself, of my capabilities, and the bounds of my personality. In these moments, I experience a heightened awareness of self--of the woman I am and am in the process [...]
He. I.
This post represents the first true stream-of-consciousness style poem I've published here (and, for better or worse, largely unedited). I was inspired to play around with the form by a reading of The Diary of Frida Kahlo, to which I dedicated the greater part of this afternoon. I am not certain how I feel about the outcome, [...]
Authenticity is Creative.
It's taken me the greater part of the last year to resolve what I falsely perceived as a dichotomy between creative interpretations of my inner experiences and the actuality of those states. The schism between how I represented myself in word and image and the reality of my consciousness. Indeed, when I first started The [...]
