HeyJaredReflections from a Recovering Perfectionist
On resilience, purpose, and the joy of being imperfect. Essays about turning hard experiences into meaning, and discovering that good enough is actually enough.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Oct 1, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
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What I'm Not Leaving My Son (opens the original)
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How do you capture family memories in scrapbooks when many of the years, although everything ended up fine, were so painful that you stopped making albums? While I thought I was “scrapbooking” for my kids so they’d have a beautiful record of their childhood, it was really about me. It was my chance to release myself from mothering pain, sit around with other women, crop photos, design pages, and infuse my creativity into something I could control.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href
The Emotional Hangover Is Real (opens the original)
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It’s been a week since my son Nick married his true love, and I’m still catching myself crying over things that have nothing to do with the wedding: an irritating driver, a task that’s harder than it needs to be, a random memory that surfaces while I’m folding laundry. I know it’s not really about the traffic or the task. It’s about the layers of feeling still working their way out of me, a week after the wedding.The emotional hangover is real.The day itself was incredible: a beautiful couple, w
I think today is my daughter’s birthday (opens the original)
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I say it that way on purpose. Not “today is my daughter’s birthday.” I think it is. When we traveled to Russia to meet her, the paperwork gave us some numbers, but we didn’t know whether they’d been translated from the traditional European date format to the American one, and no one seemed to know either. This was twenty-five years ago, long before anything like Google Translate existed to help us sort it out. Our translator, Natalya, didn’t know the answer either and suggested it would be whate
The Year I Needed a Navigator (opens the original)
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<img alt="Mountains with fog and a clear blue sky above" class="sizing-normal" height="1092" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mlky!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b
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