I have been feeling some kind of way lately, and I decided to write about it.

I’ve been writing this essay, in fits and starts, since Renée Good was murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. I was still writing it when Alex Pretti was murdered by two different ICE agents in Minneapolis while several others acted as accomplices.

Yes. Murdered. I’m not going to equivocate on that.

Good was a mother. A poet. She may or may not have been a legal observer. She was definitely a US citizen.

She was shot three times. At least once in the face. At point-blank range.

We’ve also learned that Good did not die immediately from her wounds. That she still had a pulse when ICE agents prevented a physician from checking on her.

Pretti was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital—an employee of the federal government. He was a licensed gun owner. He was trying to help a woman who had been thrown to the ground by an ICE agent.

He was pepper sprayed, then shot at least ten times. Six of those shots were fired after he already laid motionless on the ground.

Normally, something of this length would take me a few hours to write. But I spent weeks on this essay, largely because bad shit that I felt compelled to include just kept happening. But ultimately, I decided the piece was getting too long and it was time to edit and publish.

You can read the whole piece here. I hope the next thing I write will be lighter.

As an adult, getting diagnosed with ADHD is both time consuming and costly. Trying to get your meds filled, while not costly, will take hours of your life during which you’d rather be doing literally anything else. But what nobody talks about is how much things start to cost you because you have ADHD, outside of the actual medical costs of having ADHD.

So now I’m talking about it:

If you are a person with ADHD who struggles sometimes to remember to do something that is ostensibly simple, or who gets so distracted during the process of doing it that the task is never completed, companies … are counting on people like you to miss your to chance to save your money or get your money back. That way, they can keep more of it for themselves.

The costs people with ADHD do not talk about—whether because they don’t realize these are associated costs or because they do but they’re embarrassed by them—are the ones that can’t be tied directly to treating or managing their condition. They don’t talk about how they bought the same book three times because they couldn’t remember whether they owned it or not. About how they keep throwing expired yogurt away because it had been languishing for months in the back of the fridge, where they’d forgotten they’d placed it because they were on the phone with their parents when they unloaded their groceries and weren’t paying attention to what went where. About how they have now bought at least five travel pillows from various airports because they couldn’t be bothered to make a packing list and they left their other pillows at home. (Are these also examples taken from my own life? I think you already know the answer.)

Read my latest essay on Medium here.

Let’s hear it for the kind of intense, hypercompetitive type-A personalities who beat themselves up every February because they’ve “failed” their New Year’s resolutions. I know their pain so well.

A few years ago, I started setting intentions instead of making resolutions. It’s a practice that’s been very much informed by my practice as a yoga student and teacher, and it’s honestly been life-changing. More on Medium.

When I tell my students to reframe their resolutions as intentions, what I’m really telling them to give themselves permission to fail. So what if they said they were going to come to yoga four times a week and they only averaged two? So what if they started taking streaming classes rather than going to the studio because it was challenging for them to make it there on time? So what if half the time they were streaming those classes they were also distracted by their kids or their dogs or the jackhammering down the block? So what if they logged off before savasana because they had to focus on something else?

These are not the sort of things you’re supposed to beat yourself up about. But people do.

I’ve been working from home since well before the pandemic and I’ve done just fine, thank you very much. Still, there are those who are concerned workers can’t get their jobs done if they’re not wearing business casual attire and sitting at their computers from exactly 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

I call BS. We’ve been videoconferencing for more than a year now, literally seeing inside of our colleagues’ homes. It’s time that companies start to see the workers who keep their lights on as people, not just employees.

Below excerpt is from my latest piece on Medium and it is blowing up. Guess it resonates! Read the whole thing here.

Decades of workplace culture have indoctrinated us with a very specific idea of what “professionalism” is. The 9–5 schedule, the dress code, the endless meetings (and meetings about meetings), and the belief that even though laptop computers and at-home high-speed internet exist, you could really only do your job at the office, no matter how long or miserable or sometimes downright dangerous your commute.…

If there is one thing the pandemic has taught us, though, it’s that literally none of those rules of workplace professionalism matter. Professionalism in 2021 isn’t about what time you show up for work or whether your interpretation of “business casual” is consistent with your company’s policy. None of that matters. None of it ever actually mattered; we just collectively convinced ourselves over the years that it did.

It’s the Fourth of July. It’s still a pandemic. We’re entering the second month of Black Lives Matter protests. And it’s hard not to have some big, conflicting feelings, about it all:

Everywhere you look, you see America failing.

America is failing to protect its citizens from disease. Failing to protect them from racism. Failing to protect them from an increasingly militarized police. Failing to protect the enlisted amongst them from a hostile nation that has tried every way it can to destabilize our government, our economy, our society.

This one originally went out in Puppies & Politics, but I posted it on Medium, too. If you aren’t a P&P subscriber (why aren’t you a P&P subscriber?) click here. Read the full essay in the archive on the subscription page, or click here to view it on Medium.