I've recently taken up the practice of journaling every morning. Inspired, perhaps, by my concurrent readings of the journals of Anaïs Nin and Abraham Maslow, two incredibly insightful, creative, and remarkably self-aware influences on my own self-development. It is for that reason that I decided to play around with the form of this post and [...]
Tag: self-development
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, [...]
When You Need to Be Pampered…
After publishing Fishtail, I entertained the possibility that my journey into the feminine dimensions of my consciousness had, for all practical purposes, ended. That my experiment in locating the essence of my femininity would culminate there, in a series of self-identified states, desires, and creative urges. In a love of process. Blocked from further progress [...]
On Wisdom
It's an ashen sky and lo-fi Sunday. Bone dreary and mellow with intermittent sunlight. The air is pregnant with repose. Heavy. Lingering with moisture, the kind that clings to your hair and drips off the edges of your windowsills. The temperature in a slow and steady climb, typical of spring afternoons in the American South. [...]
On Play
I was fascinated to learn that Carl Jung discovered the therapeutic benefits of creativity by, himself, re-enacting a form of childhood play. An attempt to uncover the roots of an early psychological conflict. To be sure, such a desire to experiment on oneself, to delve into one's unconscious so rigorously and imaginatively, requires a playfulness [...]
