Photo by Nsaum75 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

A number of years ago I was backpacking through Mexico. I had purchased a bus ticket from Veracruz to Oaxaca. While I showed up at the bus station at the appointed hour, I was dismayed to discover that the bus had already left. My mistake, it turns out, had been to fail to correctly translate military into civilian time. I had arrived at the station two hours late.

It had been my dream to visit Oaxaca ever since reading D.H. Lawrence’s account of his time there and hearing about the pre-Columbian ruins of Monte Alban. Besides, I had a plane to catch in a few days that would take me back to the states. Somehow, I knew I just had to get to Oaxaca.

I took a bus back to Mexico City the next afternoon. In the central bus station, I tried to purchase a…

When I left Austin and moved to Eugene over three months ago, as the excitement wore off, I started to feel sad and homesick. I have moved across country to the U.S. and lived in many states. You might think I should have got used to adjusting to a new place, but things don’t always get easier because of that. Even now, on a few occasions, I still get homesick, missing my family and friends. Homesickness is not only something young children get, but something that anyone can experience. It’s normal for people to experience some degree of impairment when they are away from home, and it’s a common part of transitioning to college.

What is Homesickness?

When I first moved to Eugene, I loved my job and my colleagues, but they were so new to me, and I felt lonely. I loved the beauty of Eugene, but I was still not sure if I could get used to the rain here. I felt welcomed by friendly people here, but it was hard for me to feel secure or protected with the people…

The holiday season is coming. If you have lost a loved one, holidays often bring up a variety of mixed feelings. Good memories of past holidays can remind us of the loss and bring up feelings of sadness and pain. Seeing others celebrating the holiday with their loved ones often remind us that we not only lost the person who was so important to us, but we also lost the future we could enjoy with them. Holidays often force us to confront the loss and to realize how much our lives have been changed.

Here are some tips on how to cope with grief during holidays.

Give yourself a space to grieve. Whether you lost your loved one recently and this will be the first holiday season without that person, or if you have lost that important person years ago, holidays will be different because of the loss. It is perfectly normal to be reminded of the loss on holidays and experience waves of sadness. Give yourself permission to grieve, even if the loss happened years ago.
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Now that we’re past the halfway mark of fall term, many of the recent conversations I’ve had with people have focused upon some variation of the theme, “There’s just not enough time in the day!” Like many of you, I have been working on accepting that no matter how enthusiastically I may try, it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to check off every item on each day’s to-do list. Sometimes, I’m able to embrace this cold, hard fact and have some compassion for myself as I recount everything that didn’t get done that day. At other times, it’s very difficult to maintain that self-compassion.

If you too sometimes struggle with self-criticism, you are far from being alone. Many of us do it in some form or another, which can include doubting ourselves (“I’m so bad at making decisions”), blaming ourselves (“This is all my fault”), labeling ourselves (“I’m such a loser”), and writing off positives (“I did well that time, but anyone could have”). However, this mental habit is a particularly…