When I started college, during freshman orientation week, I was paired with an “upperclassman” as a mentor. The relationship was only intended for one week. The only thing I remember him telling me, was pointing out I had misspelled my name on my nametag (“Micheal” rather than “Michael.” I’ve mentioned before I suffer from dyslexia,…

First, I must apologize for my rant yesterday morning. This is no excuse, but twice a week I must take a dose of steroids. Invariably, steroids keep me up for most of the night and put me into an almost manic phase when it comes to my thinking. Words fly into my head at an…

In addition to my litany of character flaws, I do have a couple, maybe three, that are redemptive . . . at least in my eyes. The first is that I feel things deeply. I clearly remember my mother saying to me when I was seven, “You’re not like other children. You feel things intensely.”…

If you want to know my opinion about the war in Gaza, and I’m not sure if you do, I think all wars are a work of insanity. The most evil of evils. But if you want to understand this conflict in Israel more honestly, I suggest that you listen to the Israeli survivors and…

Dear friends, My monthly labs came in last night and once again, I’m still in remission from Multiple Myeloma. This makes 15 months of remission, for which I am profoundly grateful. I attended a Multiple Myeloma update conference this week, virtually. It was a mixed bag. On the good side, for the first time I…

John Legend ask the question in his song Show Me; I can’t stop questioningO God of love, peace, and mercyWhy so much suffering?I pray for the world, it gets worse to meWonder if you’re listening I suggested to our church that they do a program on where God is when there is suffering. I had…

First of all, I use my term “age of war” flippantly as humans have been in a state of war for the past 50,000 years, less so today than in most of our history. Overthinking The term “Overthinking” is however a realatively new term in our lexicon as depicted in the Google Ngram graph below.…

This is one of those late night/early morning word purges, so pick any heading that you are interested in, realizing that some of this is redundant. I did type fast so be gracious with my typos. Introduction This is not my final statement on my thoughts on the pursuit of self-worth, which I will return…

To summarize the points I’m trying to make here is, 1) we all wrestle with feelings of inferiority at times, 2) social mores demand that we only reveal our successes, never our failures, and 3) one of the best ways to combat this universal social ill is honesty. We all fail in 80% of our…

I wanted to spend this part looking at the scientific literature as it relates to self-esteem. There are good tools for measuring self-esteem, such as the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Unfortunately, after reading twenty or more articles, I didn’t produce much useful information. For example, it was never clear how prevalent significant issues are with self-esteem…