Do you feel like you hear about anxiety in kids and teenagers more than ever before? I just don’t remember hearing about my friends or classmates dealing with anxiety when I was growing up. 

Granted, I know there was considerable stigma surrounding mental health back in the day, so surely there was plenty of it happening, considering all the brown plaid that parents were dressing their kids in, and I guess we didn’t hear about these struggles because people just didn’t talk about it. 

Books based in the WWII era are like catnip for me, because I can’t believe there isn’t more time separating us from the treacherous events that occurred. Complex stories of unexpected relationships and the painful decisions people were forced to make seems like they couldn’t possibly have happened only 75 years ago.

They should have happened centuries ago, before our world had become civilized.

Throughout my life, I’ve always wanted to be a published author. It’s just always been a goal of mine, for as early as I can remember, and I think that as a young girl, I didn’t even really know why, I just knew it to be something I was meant to do.

I was a bookworm from a very young age, too, collecting books and pouring over them, not just obsessing over the stories inside, but also finding peculiar pleasure even in the tactile element of holding a book itself in my hands.

No, no. You don’t understand the level.

Years ago, when we first started working with our financial planner - which sounds very fancy, but I assure you it’s not like that.

Our decision to work with a financial planner came about when we were living paycheck to paycheck, and Mark and I finally acknowledged that we are children when it comes to being financially responsible, because we like shiny stuff, and we needed a non-biased person - who’s also smart with money - to tell us what we should spend and what we should save.

In the beginning of our working relationship with him, we were tasked with writing out our family’s priorities so we could finagle a budget that would work for us.

My dad and I had the almost unbelievable luxury of traveling to England last year for a family research trip for my upcoming book, and we came away with some of the most meaningful stories our family’s ever shared.

Not just because of the memories we created by traveling together and getting good, solid quality time visiting my dad’s brother and his family, who live an ocean away from us, but the stories we pieced together of our ancestors based on the research we did.

We all get asked this question and we all ask it - here in the States, at least. They don’t really ask the “what do you do” question in other countries.

We Americans ask it almost immediately upon meeting someone.  

We use it as our way of getting to know more about that person, but we - subconsciously, maybe - also use it to make a decision. We decide what we think of the other person based on what they do for a living, placing them on an invisible but very present ladder of sorts.

“I’m a used car salesman.”  Ok, we’ll put him down here, about midway down.

“I own a flooring company.” Got it - ok, we’re sticking you higher up there where business owners go.

“I’m a stay-at-home mom.” So - nothing. Doesn’t even make it on the ladder.

Sucks that stay-at-home-moms don’t get on the ladder, much less get their rightful spot at the very top of it.

But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.

Last week my old friends, Ami and Jackie, who started out as work colleagues nearly 18 years ago, but became so much more than that over time, came down to Austin from Dallas for a work visit and squeezed me in for dinner.  

They asked me why I don’t email anymore, and I told them it’s because I don’t want to bug people, to which Jackie responded, “Would you rather be forgotten?  If people don’t want to read your emails, they can hit the delete button.”

The thought of being forgotten is what got me.