For a fuller view of my writing beyond my recent posts, dive in below and peruse as much or as little as you’d like. I write about a wide range of topics from WordPress to Surrogacy to Photography to Mental Health. Don’t follow me if you want to only hear about a certain topic as I write based on what comes up for me in that moment of time. As always, thanks for reading.
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The upside
I’ve been trying to think of clever ways to reframe me being heartbroken. I was slouched in bed watching Pride & Prejudice rejoicing over the fact that I could when I realized the following: I can choose who I want to love without being used as a family bargaining chip for more land, cattle, etc. I can choose to love someone of the same sex openly in the United States and it is (mostly) okay* This is a great thing! This is momentous! Why? Because I can be openly heartbroken over someone of the same sex. How amazingly dreadful! Just the fact…
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There are no such easy answers
As Todorov notes, memory is not the opposite of oblivion. Rather, it is the result of a complex interaction between effacement (or forgetfulness) and conservation – two forces that constantly pull our minds in different directions. Thus, memory is unthinkable without selection; when we “remember” an event, it means that we conserve only some of its traits, while setting aside many others. Some of this we do immediately, some of it over time and not very consciously. Thus, notes Todorov, “it is baffling that the ability computers have to save information is termed memory, since they lack the basic feature…
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Reach out
“Who would you have dinner with if you could have dinner with anyone in the world?” I’ve been asked this before and I typically answer with dead people – Viktor Frankl, Emile Durkheim, etc. It was a sad reality when the people I so wanted to get to know were long gone. Today I reached out to two people whose brains I want to pick. One was an author and professor of a recent book I read and LOVED. The other was a clinical psychologist who helped my parents through surrogacy and who continues to conduct research on surrogacy. Why? I reached…
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Before and after moments
One of the big questions I get asked when I tell people I was a surrogate baby has to do with “when did you know?!”. Most people are expecting this giant before and after moment where one day I was just an innocent little kid and the next day I knew. I never had that. I’ve always known and my parents made sure to tell me more and more over time. Graduating from school, moving, dating, breaking up, death – all of these are before and after moments. I can remember what it felt like to have my grandfather in my…
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Childhood tunes
Believe it or not, one of the first CDs I got as a kid was Maroon 5’s “Songs About Jane”. Angsty. Alternative. Songs you could jam and cry to. Today, I had this overwhelming urge to rock some old Maroon 5 (back when they weren’t cool). To this day, I still love this version of Maroon 5 way more than any of their new music. Because my emotions were less complex than they are now… Here’s what my memories are of these songs: Happy In darkness, she is all I see Come and rest your bones with me Driving slow on…
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Those people aren’t you.
So fail. Be bad at things. Be embarrassed. Be afraid. Be vulnerable. Go out on a limb or two or twelve, & you will fall & it’ll hurt. But the harder you fall, the farther you will rise. The louder you fail, the clearer your future becomes. Failure is a gift, welcome it. There are people who spend their whole lives wondering how they became the people they became, how certain chances passed them by, why they didn’t take the road less traveled. Those people aren’t you. You have front row seats to your own transformation, & in transforming yourself,…
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Remarkable intersection
“The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations – all of them rearranging themselves so could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.” -David Levithan, Every Day
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Gift of old age
Great article on “The Wisdom of the Aged” in the NYT. Here are some of my favorite quotes & questions from it: In New York City, the population age 85 and up has been growing at five times the rate for the city as a whole, doubling since 1980 to about 150,000. For this often invisible population, the first of its size, what does an older life really look like? And can it be better? Life won out — and not just life, but a life that reflected the complicated individuals navigating it. Mr. Sorensen wanted to die, but he also…
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What you can do today
When I tore my ACL my freshmen year of college, I was lucky enough to get training from Chris Hirth over the summer while the club athletic trainer was away. I paid literally $80 bucks to get training from the head athletic trainer for UNC’s men’s basketball team. I credit not re-tearing my ACL and continuing to be as active as I am to his guidance and to that summer. The biggest lesson I learned from him was personal though. “Anne – what you can do today may not be what you did yesterday and may not be what you can do…
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More than once
“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” -Margaret Thatcher
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Mastering Small Talk
Okay – this may sound ridiculous but, for an introvert like me, this is a real thing. I’m terrible at small talk. I jump from “Nice weather, right?” to “Do you feel like you’re living a meaningful life?” way too quickly. In high school, there was even an article written by the local newspaper that somehow focused on this part of me: Anne McCarthy makes it a point to get to know people. When she approaches her teammates for one of her trademark long talks, her friends poke fun: “Anne’s gonna go have another life chat.” Not sure who they interviewed for…
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A laugh for the day
Hilarious TED talk that gave me a much needed laugh especially after dealing with spammers in my own day to day.
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“Give Me Sex Jesus”
Wow – I grew up Christian and fell away from it later on. A lot of this stuff I heard growing up. The stories of having sex before marriage being like giving away your present – that you’d be damaged goods after the fact. As I’ve gotten older and have embraced my own sexuality, I realize more and more how damaging this was for me. Fortunately, I found a group of people who helped me learn how to talk about important topics like sex, sexual identity, gender identity, etc. If you’re at all interested in the intersection of sex and christianity,…
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Most authentic thing about us
The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. -Ben Okri Someone asked me once what most inspires me about being human. My answer – our capacity to heal. From the unimaginable stories of loss and tragedy to the countless love songs highlighting heartbreak, I see our capacity to heal everywhere. It may be one of the biggest reasons why I am fascinating by WWII. There are survivors who have continued doing just that – surviving against all odds. It’s incredible. I’m heartbroken currently. Out…
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That pretty life
I have loved this song since I first heard it – the first notes had me hooked really. It’s been the tune for my alarm clock ever since. Why not wake up to a song you love and adore? It’s one of those songs that when I listen to it, I’m almost immediately hypnotized into reflection. I don’t really know why. Over the years it’s come to mean different things – for a while it reminded me of my fear of seeing my birth mom (I was born in LA). Later, it shifted to really just being related to all the people I miss.…
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A bigger disconnect
Observation of the day: When you don’t hear from someone despite there being so many damn ways to connect, it hurts more. It feels like a bigger disconnect than if we only had the option to write letters. I would be more patient if I knew that I’d only hear from someone via mail… but now? Now I can expect to hear from someone instantly through a huge number of channels in a couple clicks of a button. When you get absolutely nothing from all channels, it feels like a bigger disconnect and louder silence than staring at an empty mailbox. At least…
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In Motion
I like movement. Specifically, I like being in motion – biking, driving, working out. My mind responds well to my body in motion in whatever form it takes. It’s simple why: Being in motion makes me physically feel what it’s like to move forward. When I am trying to convince my mind and soul to move on, I move as much as I can. Physically playing out the movement prepares me mentally to do the same. Sometimes you just need to get out of town, get a new perspective. But you can’t always see that you need a new perspective because well,…
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Connecting the dots
At the end of my senior year while working at web.unc.edu, I sat down with a developer on my team determined to learn how to build a plugin. “Do you know what a boolean is?” I froze. No. “Do you know what an array is?” “Do you know what a function is?” “Do you know what a variable is?” The questions went on and on. I was stumped but determined. That was my first introduction into real programming. Since then, my approach has always been haphazard and during moments of pure fascination. Learning some programming language has always been on the perpetual “to…
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Global reach reserved for kings
This is the follow up to my first post about the book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” by Douglas Rushkoff. Let’s dive into some awesome quotes from the book since I’ve finished it long long ago yet still find myself thinking about it daily 🙂 “We can produce more effects in more than one place a time, each of us now having the global reach formerly reserved for kings, presidents, and movie stars” (page 72). This quote in particular jumped out at me. I took a sociology class on population problems and remember learning how life expectancy has dramatically…
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Surrogacy Conference Session
Over the weekend, I was traveling and listening to podcasts when one by Radio Lab caught my attention: Birthstory. It’s about an Israeli couple and the lengths they went to in order to use a surrogate. It stopped me in my tracks as it was one of the first times I’ve listened to an actual news overview of surrogacy. After hearing that, I decided to share my own story more. A couple months ago, I was on a panel for a surrogacy conference and asked if I could record the session to share with my parents. After listening to the…
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Reflection on “Status Update”
When I travel, I tend to binge listen to podcasts as I’ve found them to be an amazing tool for getting through long flights. During the most recent trek for WCUS, I listened to This American Life’s “Status Update”. It was an incredible insight into the various Status Updates we have in our society. I find social media to be fascinating and never realized that it’s basically a realtime status feed: A went on a trip to New Zealand, B got a new job, C got engaged, D got a new car, E just moved to NYC, on and on. The podcast…
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The best habit I have
I was thinking about habits recently and generally how I spend my time. How I love to go get a cup of coffee in the morning. How I read news articles on my phone and hover in and out of sleep when I just wake up. I’ve thought a lot about breaking habits recently. For example, I don’t have email setup on my phone to prevent myself from being notified and to better help myself disengage. Funny thing is that I still check my email thanks to Safari. Even better – it auto-logs me in so I might as well just have email…
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I want this Thanksgiving Miracle
I’ve already been biting my tongue since being home mainly because I know my thanksgiving is going to be a lot like the following skit minus adele saving the day 😉 Watch & laugh.
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“You should wear your hair down”
I’ve heard the above statement more times in my life than I can remember. The ironic thing is that about 10 years ago, I heard the opposite “You should wear your hair up”. I had a bob cut back then and everyone convinced me it was better to grow my hair out and wear my hair up. Hair out. Hair up. Hair down. Hair out? What is this madness. It wasn’t long after I started wearing it up that the onslaught of “You should wear it down!” started. It hasn’t stopped despite my many explanations that this is how my hair feels…
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White Male Allies
I work at Automattic, you know, the people who power this website amongst what seems like a million other things. After working at the epitome of bro-tech start up in San Francisco, it was refreshing to join the wonderful crew here. However, I was skeptical and anxious when I joined my all male team filled with mostly developers. I took what I read about white male developers in the tech world and started superimposing those ideas because I didn’t have anything else to go on. I learned quickly though that the white male category is just as stereotyped as any other. The…
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If you can keep your head
I always finished tests first. I finished the AP Latin exam in high school in 40 minutes leaving an hour and 20 minutes for me to nap. One of my classmates and close friends thought that I had given up only to find out after that I just finished really early. I got a 5 on the exam. He got a 4. I’ve always been this way. If there’s something I can plan for in advance, it will be done ahead of schedule. Papers in college were always finished weeks ahead of the due date. My biopsychology class had as a portion of…
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Seek Balance
My job the summer going into my sophomore year was working at dorm. I had the glamorous title of a “conference assistant” along with the 10 or so other students who decided to stick around that summer. It’s the only job I’ve ever had that never involved WordPress so that might explain why I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other jobs I’ve had 🙂 As part of the job, we each were assigned shifts from 12AM to 8AM periodically throughout the summer. During one of these night shifts, I started talking to a basketball coach who was helping run a camp…
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Dublin Views
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Dublin Art
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Dublin in Food
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