When marriage becomes both your community and your boundary, what happens to the life you leave behind?

I remember when Love is Blind premiered in 2020. It was a few weeks before the world shut down and my Instagram For You page was flooded with both memes from the show and information about COVID-19. At first, I didn’t watch it, because I already had numerous TV shows I liked to watch and didn’t want to spend an entire weekend sucked into another show.

I remember when my seventh grade art teacher gave me a C.

It was a landscape watercolor painting. I thought it was great and I’d never gotten anything other than an A in art class before. I also loved the arts and grew up drawing, painting, sculpting, and beading, always eager to create. My art was always abstract and perceptual; that was what came naturally to me and I’d always allowed my passion to be at the forefront of my creativity. 

How do we not lose hope?
I’ve always been proponent of not giving up and using toughness to fight against oppressive political movements and leaders.

But right now, things feel hopeless in a way I’ve only read about in books.

I feel it, too.

When ever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them I wanted to be a singer.

From elementary school, I found myself drawn to music and wanting to express myself through song. I started writing songs when I was just seven or eight years old, chronicling my hopes, dreams, fears, and disappointments into lyrics. 

Jul 24

One of the earliest Republican attacks on Vice President and Candidate Harris is that she is what’s known as a ‘DEI hire.’ An entirely racist and sexist attack, the aforementioned white male member of Congress who made these remarks (and is himself unremarkable) began his statement by pointing to Harris being a black woman and asking the what-aboutism question of other types of woman (ie white…he actually said as much) that were looked over in favor of the less-qualified Harris.

Seeing likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris embrace the branding is what really got me to pay attention. I’d wondered why so many girlies I follow had started to go a bit grunge; flawed is now the thing to be.

How legitimate are the concerns about Biden’s age? It depends who you ask or how you look at it.

For the longest time, I thought I was ugly.

Truthfully, I still do. It’s just that I now look back at the girl I was then, who thought she was fat, who hated her body and wanted more than anything to be thin.

Growing up in the early 2000’s was rough. I have to give some credence to the influence that the culture had on me, through the collective unconscious. I was, like anyone, internalizing the preferences that were shown to me, through the media, peer relationships, and my own experiences in public and private spaces. 

All of that is to say, being thin was the beauty ideal and I was not that.

There is an old saying (I think it might come from Brené Brown?) that we are wounded by others and must also heal with others. In other words, healing doesn’t happen in isolation. That’s why even the most self-aware person can still benefit from therapy, as the feelings that are shared and emotional experience that arises between the therapist and patient are what allows the healing process to take place. This doesn’t just happen in therapy, though, and is why we might find ourselves commiserating with friends, joining support groups, or even partaking in a group fitness class. There is something powerful that happens when we are vulnerable and share an experience with others that you can’t totally re-create in thinking, reflecting, or writing alone. It’s why the pandemic was so painful as a collective, as we were in pain, alone, disconnected from others. There’s so much research documenting the detrimental effects of loneliness, as experiences of social isolation have been linked to everything from heart disease to depression and anxiety.