Some trusted sources recommended I start the New Year resting, practicing radical self-care & compassion, and—thankfully, this one comes easy for me—reading. In past years, I might have resisted all but the reading part, guilted myself out of what’s best for me, or even scoffed at the thought.

But, I’m at the point in my writing journey where I can no longer deny what I know is true. Self-care and self compassion are essential to sharing my story with you. I’ve recently made a big breakthrough on my book and now that I know what it’s about, I’m committed to making massive progress toward its completion in 2019 (stay tuned).

Meanwhile, between reading client work–and skimming materials that might support it and them–and what I read for personal and professional growth, pleasure, and my book group’s selection of the month, I’ve probably got seven titles going at the moment.

In a post-script to a recent FB post marking the end of my first course-retreat launch, I wrote: This is the End of the Little Island I Call Home.

I meant it literally. I was down on the beach at end of the Island sitting in the sand.  I couldn’t do more in that moment than promise to write a blog post–as soon as I got some rest–sharing with you all I’d learned when I hadn’t sold enough spots to make walkyourtalk2018.com a go for 2018.

“Where can we see one of your talks, Clementina?” Two business-friends asked in unison.

We were all at a conference where I’d become known for helping people write talks. I’d seen these two gentlemen at the bar and had gone over to say hello. They complimented my work, shared some great feedback they’d heard about me, and then promptly put me on the spot.

“Mom, want me to teach you a Levitating Hand Trick?”

When my oldest was eight, he presented the question to me one Sunday morning. Finished with my second cup of coffee, I felt up for the challenge.

“Hold out your arm,” he instructed, getting right to work. He pushed down so gently that when he removed the pressure, nothing happened.

“Maybe it only works on kids,” he offered.

“I’m sure it works on adults too. Want to try again?”

We did.

Ten days before Christmas, my husband fell in love with a lab-hound in a pink rhinestone collar. I can’t blame him; she’s fetching. Her eyes are so intelligent, they remind me of Virginia Woolf’s.

I suppose I’m partly responsible; beyond our travel-work schedules, Dominic and I are terrible at syncing our calendars. Roughly two times a year, we double book; it’s annoying but not annoying enough for either of us to have remedied the situation yet.

“Forget you had a grandmother?” It’s what mine always said to me when I waited too long to call or stop by.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about her, I had.

But I was a twenty something year old English professor and it was the end of the semester, which always landed me in scarcity around time. I wouldn’t even call to say hi or stop in and check on her like I normally did because I’d so much rather go over for what usually amounted to at least an hour, if not an entire afternoon.

When Tamsen Webster invited me to be a VIP at the Boston Opera House on October 12, 2017 for TEDx Cambridge, I started packing. Tamsen had previously asked me if I’d be interested in weighing in on the talks, providing much needed feedback to the participants as they began the several month process of distilling their areas of expertise into succinctly prepared–18 minutes or less– talks deemed worthy of TED’s tagline, “ideas worth spreading.”

“After all,” she said. “This is what you do.”

My friend, Cheryl, invited me to hang with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while when we ran into each other outside our kids’ school at the end of last winter.

When I politely declined, she asked me what was up…if everything was o.k.

Everything wasn’t o.k. It was the middle of a New York winter, the holidays had been stressful, the side of political conversations at every meal had given me chronic indigestion, friends didn’t seem to understand me anymore, and, in my business, I had to make some tough decisions I wasn’t expecting to have to make so soon

A week or two ago, I had a memoir chapter submission due to my writing coaches. A threesome of writers, this particular configuration has been submitting to each other twice a month for about a year. You’d think it’d be old hat by now but when I attached the document to the e-mail I’d written, I felt incredibly anxious. I was reluctant to click send.

I grew up in Astoria, Queens; an Italian enclave, just outside New York City, my grandparents lived there too. My paternal grandmother’s brothers and sisters lived down the road apiece, in the once hardscrabble neighborhood of Ravenswood. Fireworks were legal in the mid 70’s, though tricky to get and dangerous to use, and the dark-alley Ravenswood streets seemed the perfect place for my great-uncle Pat–short for Pasquale–and the “old-enough” contingent of his nephews and sons to play with whatever fireworks he’d managed to score.