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I once had fourteen different self-care apps on my phone that all promised to help me win at calm. Nope. Fourteen new things to worry about. My favorite, the anxiety relief app that sent me…

My anchor was my wife Angela. I knew I was too dependent on her, so when she brought up kids, I panicked and made a PowerPoint. Why We Shouldn’t Have Children. Nine slides. “Studies show…

At Microsoft, I was sitting through my annual performance review in my manager Ryan’s office. The walls plastered with technical documents that would make Matt Damon’s Will Hunting scratch his head. I’d spent weeks over-preparing.…

One day my daughter insisted on pushing the oversized Costco cart by herself. Costco carts are cargo ships on wheels. They’re designed to haul a metric ton of paper towels and rotisserie chickens. At the…

Before life with my wife Angela, I lived alone in a condo with a radiator. Most mornings, I’d been staring at the clock since 5:23, calculating how long until I could text someone on the…

I spent two decades without air conditioning; twenty summers sleeping under wet towels instead of blankets. Now my home is cold enough to make guests reach for sweaters. But it’s not about compensating for all…

I learned what I was supposed to believe and I couldn’t make myself believe it. When the anxiety got bad, people of faith kept handing me the same prescription. Have faith. Sometimes the implication was…

It was early afternoon when I heard my wife Angela’s office door open. We’d both slept through our alarms, so we hadn’t spoken all day. Barked commands back and forth as we panicked to make…

I was driving out of a gym parking lot and my phone rang. New York number. “Jonathan?” My otherwise somber editor sounded pleased. “You did it. Made the list. Your book is a New York…

I looked at the mess of bumpy, ghost-white scars around my right knee. The surgeries were brutal. They harvested a tendon from my hamstring to rebuild what was gone. For months, I couldn’t bend my…