ecca
aisch

I chased those moments wherever I could get my hands on them: relationships, academics, careers. The highs were high, and the lows were crushing. So crushing, in fact, that I would sabotage myself.

This wasn’t a question from a colleague or a friend. It was not a question for me to reflect on pensively. And it was not asked lightly, but it was asked with sincerity: How do you know you’re good at what you do?

Part of what is so devastating for women is that everyone around us, your co-workers, society, your institutions are saying the system you live and breathe in, “Is normal.” Well, if that’s the case then I must be abnormal. I must be the problem.

. . . at one point, she paused toward the end of our conversation and said, “You seem sad.”

Elle, I’m not talking about getting into Harvard Law School. I’m talking about something that can feel just as scary: putting yourself out there for public consumption and judgment.

I knew one of my book's characters was going to be named Ulla, yet I knew almost nothing about her. So I did what writers do. I Googled her.

Confession: I am not a naturally good friend. It took my best friend from college texting me out of the blue — right when I had quietly decided maybe we’d just been seasonal friends — to wake me up. Her message wasn’t small talk. She told me she had cancer.

Whether it was innate or modeled, my home was filled with self-help books: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Tony Robbins on cassette tapes (I had no idea he was still relevant until last year and did firewalking. Who knew?), Zig Ziglar on Top Performance, along with several James Dobson parenting books (not advocating, just reporting). So why, decades later, is self-help still a billion-dollar industry? Shouldn’t we have collated all this advice by now and distilled i

Gotta love me some Britney Spears. Back in the era when I was hip-hop dancing and clubbing in Hollywood (I really, truly, just wanted to be a backup dancer for pop stars), Britney gave me everything: the beat, the attitude, and most important—the cowbell. ;) She and I are both in our mid-40s now, and though it’s my strange fantasy to do a choreographed dance number with her, I suspect she might feel the same way I do these days: sure . . . but let’s not have anyone actually w

I remember the day I discovered I was a runner. It was third grade in Western Nebraska. Mr. Howard made us run a lap around the football-sized field behind our elementary school. It probably wasn’t actually the size of a football field, but to a third grader, it felt enormous. I usually stuck with my friends, the three of us slogging along together, mildly annoyed. That day, I noticed the boys ahead of us, and I realized my pace felt like walking. Like, maybe I could go faste

The Scientific Recipe for an Authentic (and Happy!) Life

In 2020, I joined a writing group that still meets today. If you had asked a former draft-version of me whether I’d ever be part of something like that, I would’ve laughed. No way. Too introverted. Too skeptical. But it ended up being life-changing. Then they encouraged me to join Instagram. Cue the ughhh. I hated social media. I’d been off the grid since I quit MySpace (and if you know MySpace, we’re automatically friends). There had been some fun at FictionPress starting in

I’m a longtime fan of journalist Danielle Robay’s Question Everything podcast. It used to be called Pretty Smart, a title I loved, but the evolution fits her perfectly. The show now centers on conversations that gently (and sometimes not so gently) challenge the status quo. At the end of every episode, Danielle asks her female guests a rapid-fire question. If you’ve listened long enough, you can feel it coming: “What is something every woman should try once?”

Isn’t it selfish to question a good life? If nothing is “wrong,” why does something feel unfinished?