It was a New Year’s night like any other, until it became the one that would change the course of my life forever.

It was a chilly evening and I was enjoying a glass of wine or two with friends, while my two older girls were out with theirs.

Just when I was starting to relax, my older daughter called to say her sister was lying in the gutter, drunk. She was so concerned that she had also called for an ambulance. She was a very sensible 16-year-old who, over a decade later, is now an emergency room nurse.

It…

Have you ever had a conversation with someone you’re attracted to, that has left you feeling physically uncomfortable and confused?

It’s possible you’ve had an encounter with an oblivious narcissist.

There is a spectrum of narcissism that ranges from those who are hyper-aware and hypervigilant manipulators, to those who breeze through life thinking they are gods and that any and all of their behavior is correct and beyond reproach. They don’t have a clue about the damage they are doing to those around them.

We’ve had one of the latter showing how incredibly dangerous oblivious narcissists are in the White…

If you’re wondering when your writing on Medium is going to start earning you some money, you need to figure out if there’s anything you can do to influence that directly. You also need to remember to be patient.

All of the top writers will tell you that their stories often see spikes in reader time and earnings long after they have been published.

You can see the progress of one of my recent stories from January to February here:

What do you do when someone you love starts saying things that are just “crazy”? It’s a real worry that more people seem to be believing conspiracy theories than ever before and the pandemic has created an era of unprecedented fear and anxiety. It’s a fertile ground for conspiracy theories to thrive.

I woke in the early hours of Christmas Eve to a few messages from my sister, saying she was deeply concerned about our dad.

He doesn’t even live in the US, but he has got it into his head that Trump was robbed of his second term by…

My marriage ended and my new life began with a bang. I had been with my husband for most of my adult life. It took all of my energy to try to fix our marriage but it was doomed to failure from the outset. There was a moment when I could have given up on life and I nearly did.

I was on the phone to a friend while sitting in my car in my home town, ready to drive home after doing some shopping.

A Hollywood movie star walked across the road in front of my parked car. And…

The first time my husband and I went for couple counseling was within the first year of our marriage.

The counselor stated that my husband appeared to have no conscience. That was alarming. I should have realized at that moment that there was nothing I could do to make the problems in our relationship go away.

Obviously I brought my own baggage to the marriage. Everybody does. I had rejection issues due to my mother’s adoption. My dad’s repressive, religious upbringing left me with a reticence and slight eccentricity that I have never shaken off.

But my husband was a…

I had tried to leave multiple times in the early months and years of our marriage but he told me he would ‘never let me leave’ and took steps to ensure that I couldn’t.

In the latter years, after I had become a human doormat for him, everything about me repulsed him and he was looking elsewhere for adoration and attention to feed his needy narcissism. I began to think that if I started looking for someone else, it would be fitting that his unreasonable jealousy and paranoia would suddenly now have a reason.

I tried one last time to…