A couple weeks ago, my body became the subject of lewd dissection by a man I had never met before. We’d swapped the usual waiting-in-line courtesies. Then …that. A crass line about my body said to the cashier, said with a smirk, for me to overhear. I felt ashamed by features defined by genetics and not choice. I felt sexualized wearing plain jeans and a baggy sweater. …
I think the part of the female beauty standard that upsets me the most and makes me the angriest isn’t the fact that it’s so arbitrary. It’s not that it’s impossible, or materialistic, or sexist, or Anglo-centric, or violent, or unnatural (though those are maddening and heartless). What makes me angriest is that we tell women the only way to be beautiful is to become …
Depression lies. Deep, dark, dirty lies. Lies that we know are lies. They echo the black places in our hearts that say we don’t deserve better, so we believe it because we need a reason to feel the way we do. We know it isn’t right, but we can’t make sense of anything else. Depression is the ultimate abuser – convincing you that no one …
I’ve always been a sucker for the underdog. Or cat, as the case may be. All of my cats have been rescues since I was a kid. The family mythology goes that smuggled a stray kitten in my coat when I was five when we were out of town on a trip. My parents didn’t discover this until we were halfway home. So began my …
It’s a strange feeling realizing without realizing that your whole life’s story has been a lie – one of those optical illusions you’ve spent decades thinking is a bunny and you find out it’s been a duck all along. You’re never able to find your footing, always feeling slightly off-kilter, like an existential inner ear infection. The image above showed up in my inbox last …
