Compassionate Writer on Substack

Blog: Essays

Featured
Are You Phosphorescent?

Every quarter I contribute an essay to Elan Vitae Magazine. For Spring 2024, I wrote an essay entitled “Phosphorescent,” which was inspired by my March 2024 blog. (If you are curious, you can read that HERE.)

Every issue has a theme, and the Spring 2024 theme is Light. I love to create some contstraint when writing—these guardrails give you a place to start—but when I first thought about Light as a starting place, it confounded me. There were so many ways I could go with this essay—not much constraint there!

Spring Is On Our Doorstep and Writing Awaits

Spring is on our doorstep. You can feel the groundswell of energy waiting—and not patiently. Daffodils have started to burst from the soil even amidst the snow melt that still remains in places. Green is beginning to creep back into the landscape— the soft, tentative green of spring.

Wintering in the Absence of Mothering

As we head into a time of Wintering, a time of receding and regrouping, a time of cocooning and hygge, I am abundantly aware of the stillness and silence that surround me – especially since my daughter left for college. The silence really isn’t silent, though, and the stillness seems to be an illusion as well. Or maybe it’s just that my expectation of these isn’t what I am currently experiencing. 

The Other 99,999
self-compassion Heather Fraser self-compassion Heather Fraser

The Other 99,999

I woke up in the morning worried. I worried all through the day. I worried when I went to bed.

Every single day, my entire day was lived in anticipation of the 10 to 12 times my heartbeat would skip. It started just a few months before, with that first incident of an irregular heartbeat, when the doctor assigned to my case came to my hospital bedside and made his pronouncement:

You have atrial fibrillation. You have a high risk of stroke. If we can’t control it with medication, we will have to use the defibrillator to give you a shock.

I was 35 years old. This was not supposed to be happening.

Read More