And it’s doing all of this and tolerating all of this and signing up for all of this again and again because you love how it makes you feel to treat yourself like the athlete you might not have known you could be, and because knowing this about yourself makes everything else that happens to you seem just a little more manageable.

In every post I read about job dissatisfaction and burnout, someone mentions going hours without eating.   This is something I literally cannot do. I become increasingly useless, grouchy, and shaky, and my stomach starts to cramp and puff up. I deal very poorly...

I went on a bike ride with a friend last year along a rail trail. I think this was the first time I’d ridden a bike in literally 25 years. It was a beautiful afternoon, but this ride was seriously ugly. There were a million people on the trail: kids on bikes and...

What if it’s OK to throw ourselves into something we love, at the expense of something we don’t? What if we can love something fiercely without spending as much time on it as we do on something else? What if all the things we love don’t actually have to take an EQUAL amount of time? What if some of the best parts of life involve freedom from balance?

Once, when I was a teenager, I went on vacation with my family and there was a girl staying there who looked like a model from Seventeen magazine. She was tall and willowy and had hips and endless legs. She was also only 13.

How many of you were “the smart kid” when you were growing up? Getting into vet school was no joke, and neither was getting out.