Battle with the bread knife

And learning to ask for help

Not the knife in question, but eerily similar. Photo by Dovile Ramoskaite

I’m no stranger to cutting myself with a kitchen knife—except this time, it’s a serrated blade.

It’s best if I downplay the situation to my mom, who is still FaceTiming with my daughter (and once fainted over a finger laceration my dad received from a chain saw.) Wrapping the wound in a towel that is taking on an alarming shade of crimson, I shove the piece of sourdough bread I was cutting into the toaster and rifle through the first-aid kit for a Band-Aid. It’s barely secure when my husband insists on re-wrapping with gauze, making me grateful I married an Eagle Scout.

Yet the cut never fully clots, bleeding and throbbing on and off throughout the evening. I seriously consider driving myself to the ER. Before drifting to sleep, I make the decision to head to urgent care first thing the next morning—even though it meant (gulp) asking my husband to rearrange his schedule.

Good news? I avoided stitches, thanks to my husband’s quick thinking and being a “fast healer.” The bad news is it’s excruciatingly hard to type without your left middle finger—let alone cook dinner, strength train, or tackle an art project with my five-year-old. But it makes me wonder why I excel at managing other peoples’ medical crises, yet struggle to ask for support with my own.

At some point, I took on the belief that the longer I could withstand physical pain, the stronger of a person I’d be. Yet there’s also a fine line between mental toughness and stupidity, and this isn’t the first time I’ve tested the boundary.

So while I get in the habit of regularly asking my husband for help (seriously, I’d rather drag a bar stool across the room than ask him to grab something from an upper cabinet he’s standing next to), I’m curious to know:

Have you ever given yourself a ridiculous injury? What happened, and what did you learn from it?

Leave me a comment and let me know.

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Previously on The Write-Life Balance

Happy launch day to

Alyssa Jarrett

’s debut book baby! 🥳 Make sure to grab a copy of Love Apptually, and tune in to our latest conversation about her author journey.

From marketing exec to indie author

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Links for May 🔗

🐉 Fourth Wing isn’t my favorite Rebecca Yarros book by a long shot, but I quite like Iron Flame—similar to my feelings of the Harry Potter series, where I didn’t get invested until the Chamber of Secrets.

🧠 Signed up for a Shortform trial to read a summary of The Master and His Emissary (it’s 658 pages!) and gladly kept the subscription—an amazing resource for anyone who meanders through popular non-fiction books!

🌊 “Train intensively, then surrender” is a perfect way to describe how an artist gets into creative flow.

😠 Glad Red Boat Fish Sauce set good boundaries with Trader Joes from the start, because other POC-owned food brands aren’t so lucky.

🥛 Enjoying homemade pistachio milk in my tea, courtesy of my Almond Cow. (Psst…use the leftover nut pulp to make these brownies.)

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Proud Mama Moment 👩‍👧

My heart may have exploded when my daughter wrote me an early Mother’s Day card during a visit to the local bookstore. (I dictated the letters to her a few days prior, but had no idea she’d remember! 😭)

Happy May,

Sophia 🙂

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P.S. As you can imagine, weekly-ish updates without a left middle finger isn’t working as well as I imagined. Rethinking some things, and will share more once I finalize the upcoming changes—thanks for sticking around!