Jenni Marie 3 Minute Read I’m a girl. I have grumpy, self-centered days. The end. (Or not.) On yet another dreadfully difficult, supercharged emotional day, I wasn’t exactly living like Pollyanna. My heart heavy, my mind foggy, my words muddled. Seeing people and smiling at them was the LAST thing I wanted to do, but I had to make it…
Jenni Marie 4 Minute Read The spotlight. She was standing in the spotlight. A crowded room of young adults turned immediately claustrophobic as the shaft of light illuminated only her wide-eyed panic. Twenty-five pairs of eyes reflected outside that ring of light, and there wasn’t so much as a twinkling kindness among them. Everyone stared in contempt at her makeup…or…
Jenni Marie 3 Minute Read You’ve seen her. At church. At the family dinner table. At book club. At the gym. She’s the one who’s moved from the next town over, the sister-in-law your brother married, the college student who feels misplaced, the foreigner who is still learning cultural idioms. She’s the new girl. Life as the new girl is…
Jenni Marie 4 Minute Read I feel my strongest when I’m at my weakest. I was at the gym, proud of my just-finished strength-training routine. My legs were so fatigued, I barely made it down the stairs to the parking lot as I fought through the trembling muscles. Yet in the weakness, there was the underlying reality that I knew…
Jenni Marie 3 Minute Read I had barely lasted a half mile. As in, I hadn’t even hit the half mile mark. As in, I had barely even begun my workout. The grumbling started earlier than normal. My muscles grumbled, my brain grumbled, my heart grumbled, my lungs grumbled. Grumblegrumblegrumble. I didn’t want to be running, I didn’t want to…
Jenni Marie 4 Minute Read My year ended softly, gently. A welcome respite from the past several months of turmoil and emotion and change and adjustments, I spent the first day of the new year with one of my dearest friends reflecting on the past year and preparing (bracing, really) for a new one. During the season of refreshment, she…
Jenni Marie 5 Minute Read I didn’t know I was supposed to hate Valentine’s Day. At least, not until I was almost passed over at a seventh grade homeschool group Valentine’s Party at the roller skating rink. I was the last girl given a daffodil by the most popular boy in the group; he started with probably twenty hand-picked flowers….
Jenni Marie 5 Minute Read Her yellow crocs with tan hosiery under the calf-length brown skirt were the most noticeable at first, until I saw that his fashion hero was The Man With the Yellow Hat and realized both splashes of yellow matched her very vibrant vest. He leaned heavily on his cane, clinging to his boarding passes and glancing…
Jenni Marie 4 Minute Read Societal stigmas (or maybe just my own prejudice) left me perpetually wary of people who meet weekly with a therapist. I assumed they were shirking responsibility for their lives by paying someone else to tell them how to live, act, and think. Whoever painted that picture for me, I chose to believe it. Several years…
Jenni Marie 5 Minute Read I am a photographer; a photographer to the very core of my being. I see the world as a series of snapshots, a compilation of images to compose, collect, and remember. As I coped through those first days of culture shock, I almost forgot that imperative truth about myself. I tried to see the world without my camera and process what I saw without a digital memory. It didn’t work.
The End.
The End.