Pete Michaud

Fundamental Needs #1: Whipping the Ones You Love

Julie loves dogs. She is a member of PETA, and a vegan. When she was a kid she had a dog named Bella. Bella was her best friend because her mother resented her in a way that most children only think their mothers resent them, and her scam artist dad had pissed off years prior. Julie moved every few months...

Change the World, No Excuses

Thank you very much!! Your blog was a little spark that ignite a fire inside me. I don’t know if you remember, but my heart was destroyed, and the next day a I got an email from G8 (the best 8 universities in Australia) inviting me to apply for masters. It was something i have always wanted, but at...

The Art of Honesty

Honesty is something I’ve talked about here because being honest begins with self-honesty. You can’t “be authentic,” or build the life you want without self honesty because you’ll have no idea who you are or what you want to do if your entire mental life is walls and facades....

How to Choose Your Emotions

We think our emotions happen to us. The internal experience of an emotion makes it feel inevitable. Our language even tricks us: that phone bill made me angry. But that’s an illusion. To prove that our reactions and experiences are entirely within our control, I present one Thích Quảng Đức. ...

The Awesome Power of Forgiveness

I wept like a heart broken child just now. It’s not a cute and shocking metaphor. I was literally wracked with sobs, convulsing in the fetal position on this couch in the San Francisco Bay Area until about 30 seconds ago. This requires some context. I’ll tell the whole story some day, but...

Words Have Power

“Tiff’s a chocolate whore.” Ben is Tiffany’s husband, and he’s a well-meaning guy. He has a bit of a way with words. The three of us are walking into a Godiva store to pick up a treat for Tiffany. Ben says “Tiff’s a chocolate whore.” “Aficionado?...

You’re Right

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry...

How to Break Your Limits

Gema is 23 years old and might be gay. She’s not sure. (Not news.) The problem about being maybe-gay is that Gema lives with her hyper-conservative parents, and has no legal rights as an unmarried Muslim woman in Indonesia. She was in a bind. Her parents expect her to find a nice boy (of their...

Make it Obsolete

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller Fuller was, among many other interests, a systems theorist. When he said you have to make parts of a system obsolete to change anything...

Stop Apologizing

This is a note to self. I’m pretty good at not apologizing for who and what I am, but this whole energy work thing got my panties in a bunch. Half of my friends think energy work is obvious. A fact of nature, and of life. The other half unsubscribed from my e-mail list after the essay went out....