Michelle Porter

There's a commercial that still makes me laugh. A comedian sits cross-legged on the floor with a group of kids — the kind of heart-to-heart circle that makes you lean in. He asks them about more. And one little girl, utterly sincere, explains it perfectly: when we like something, we want more. We want more. She's not wrong. That's what gets me every time. The wanting is human and alive and true. But watch her face. She hasn't finished loving the first thing before the wanting-more has already...

Life has a funny way of getting in the way of itself. One minute you're living it on your terms. The next, you're living on its terms. This happens to most of us more regularly than we'd like to admit. And if you're anything like me, someone who resists a changed plan unless I'm the one doing the changing, you feel every single instance of it. The smaller disruptions? Those tend to bring out my fighter. The advocate who problem-solves, pushes back, finds another way. But sometimes life...

The words arrived as a dismissal, the conversational equivalent of a door closing. We'd been discussing a recent event—nothing abstract, nothing theoretical. I was sharing what I'd witnessed directly. They were holding tight to what they'd heard from sources they trusted. When our accounts didn't align, there was no curiosity about how two people might experience the same situation differently. No room for "tell me more about what you saw." Just this: believe what you want. The phrase...