Fifteen years ago this month, I was crouched down on the shiny white tile floor of an empty big box store, stocking shelves for hours on end while listening to the same few CDs on repeat. I’d finished my college course work in December but wouldn’t officially graduate until May. I was back in my hometown and needed to bring in some money while searching for a full-time position, so I took a job setting up a new Target store.
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“You are never alone or helpless. The force that guides the the stars guides you too.” –Shrii Shrii Anandamurt, quoted in You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero
I had a small epiphany recently. For months, my son had been saying something that sounded like “dapadee.” I had no idea what it meant. I felt certain he wasn’t just babbling nonsense syllables, though, because he would say it over and over again. Dapadee! Dapadee! Dapadee dapadeeeeee… What the heck is dapadee? I thought. My husband speculated that maybe he was trying to say “patootie,” which we sometimes call him. We went with that theory for a while because we had no other ideas. For probably three months or so, along with the many other words he was learning, he kept repeating, Dapadee!
“I don’t think that fear is the problem. I think the problem is that we often don’t know what to do with our fear. We don’t know how to acknowledge it for what it is — which is a feeling which might be giving us some information about the world, but it’s also giving us information about ourselves.”
–Kim Brooks, in an interview with NPR
