Big shout-out dude for bringing more attention to Holocaust Remembrance Day by signing that anti-immigrant executive order exactly on that day, although the next night it did get a little dicey at the airports.
I can’t believe something is true for me but not for other people. So if I tell myself that anxiety and depression doom me to a miserable life—and God knows I’ve been telling myself that since forever—then I’m extending that same fate to anyone with similar issues. And that’s not fair.
My first husband wanted to pee on me. I kid you not. He wanted me to dress down to my skin and lay in that cold vessel of a tub with the drain stabbing me in the head so that he could piss all over me.
As I continued cutting her hair, I didn’t confess my own insecurities. Instead, I talked about cultural constructs of beauty, gender and how we don’t teach men that the true measure of their self-worth is their fuckablity quotient the way we do women.
When I asked him if he knew what the word meant, especially when it came to sex, he immediately went on the defensive and said, “God, Mom! Do you think I’m going to rape someone?”
He knew about me and he wanted me with him. He never used my past against me. Not once. Not the way my own mind used it against myself. That is why I stayed for another five years after the first time he hit me.
Here is how you wet-towel. You take the thing you might have stepped out of, a skin, a time, a loss, a tiny pair of pants, a hit in the face. You take that thing and you wrap yourself in it.
Even if I wasn’t a novelist, even if the most high-powered literary agent on the planet told me I was full of shit, I was still a writer. Isn’t a painter still an artist even when no one buys his canvases?
Somehow, over time, it seems that I have developed a boatload of anxiety. And, quite frankly, I'm irritated about it! There's no doubt that I have earned my anxiety stripes in recent months.
. I opened my eyes to look around the room, and the sight of everyone praying together like that made me shed the most genuine tears I had in a long time. I felt Joanie squeeze my hand, and I looked over to find her looking right at me. Her eyes were shining bright with the knowledge that we were feeling the same thing, and suddenly I got it.
But there was something about my biopsy earlier this year that unsettled me. Learning that my body—a body capable of cancer—was on the verge of destruction, in the very place where new life has the potential to enter this world. When I feel mysterious aches and pains, I hold my breath and wonder if my body is continuing to plot its own demise.
The narrative of the evil foster mother is an easy one to spin. What is mostly known is the neglect and trauma that makes the news -- children are bounced from one home to another with no one to look out for them. We talk openly about how it would be a shame for a child in crisis to end up in foster care. We all know what happens there.
