Before I stopped drinking coffee, I walked around feeling as if someone had punched me behind the eyes. Like my brain had little arms that kept whacking the dark side of my orbs. I thought it was fatigue, allergies, a possible need for glasses. I never thought: caffeine.

You, also, are a wonderful writer because you are a wonderful person. If you write what is true about yourself, your heart, your life experiences, your writing sings. 

What if in the moment after a child is born, the mother reaches out and touches the child and, in that moment, all the stars in the universe gather and the child knows itself as an I?

When you get acupuncture, in addition to having your pulses read, the practitioner looks at your tongue. It makes so much sense. The state of the tongue reveals the state of your digestive system.

When you give up something, you create a space, and that’s when the wild can step in. I gave up coffee and ended up with a gorgeous pencil made from coffee grounds. There are many wonderful things about life. One of them is irony.

Being high on sugar or caffeine is a way of outracing the devil. You can’t get me if I’m high.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” I whispered to the doctor and his students, “but don’t tell me to stop.”

“That’s spleen energy,” he said. “Too much thinking. It’s all connected.” Spleen imbalance shows up as stomach and digestive issues, the very things that had gotten me started on this 93-day project.

Once you’ve seen what opening your heart does, how can you do less? 

I wish our grief were louder, our community tighter, so we could get on with the business of healing,  of loving even more recklessly, more completely, and with great sloppiness and devotion. 

"Leaky gut syndrome" is said to have symptoms including bloating, gas, cramps, food sensitivities, and aches and pains. But it's something of a medical mystery.

I didn’t know our stories as adopted people could be accurately portrayed outside the bundles of our own skins until I saw Randall do his thing on This Is Us.