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I’m almost pleased when my mother calls me while I’m in a bad mood. Finally, someone to take it out on, someone who loves me too much to make me face a consequence for my temper tantrum.
I spent time with myself, and grew to hate her.
Don’t I have an editor who can stop me from writing dumb shit like that? [Ed. note: Yes, but do you listen?]
No one likes getting punched in the stomach, but a sucker punch hurts the body and the ego. I’m tired of being shocked by pain.
I had other things to worry about than old wives’ tales about how many stomach rolls an adult woman should or shouldn’t have based on how many kids she poops out. (Incidentally, at eleven, I still thought babies came out anally.)
watching me get stuck in a blouse—real women call their shirts blouses—would be the night’s real show.
Do you realize how much I have to love you in order to play a card game that asks, earnestly, “What character do you think I would play in a movie?” We all know it’s going to be whomever Mindy Kaling is playing that year. It’s fine. We don’t need to make a whole meal out of this answer.
she stretched her hand toward my chest, the constellation of moles on her forearm mocking me, and plucked out my darkest secret, my little shame, the self-terror I tortured myself with for decades. Then she held it in front of my face and said, I found this. It’s yours, right? You talk about it all the time so surely it must be yours.
You have to accept that you’re not uglier than anyone, but you’re not more beautiful. That your body isn’t just something to be admired—though it can be, if you want—but a tool that lifts, moves, twists, breaks, folds, and dies.
Goodreads, a democratized book review website steadily destroyed by people who can’t fucking read, wasn’t a place I visited often.
“You own everything that happened to you,” Anne Lamott wrote in her 1994 book Bird by Bird. “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” A nice concept, even if from a white woman from San Francisco who has blonde dreadlocks and has written several books subtitled “Thoughts on Faith.”
and I’m not sure when I’ll stop feeling like that. It’s as if a barrier formed in my life in my early thirties; everything before was naive and argumentative and ridiculous and everything after was painful and empty and honest.
Makes sense, a group of mostly white children building an igloo several kilometers away from Tsuut’ina Nation, while learning about Canada’s Indigenous people in the past tense.
When Parvati is too soft, and when even Durga isn’t fierce enough, Parvati’s final form is beckoned. Kali is an oft-feared Hindu goddess, a destructive but essential female god in Hinduism. You’ve probably seen her before, her eyes wide and spooky, tongue hanging out, a garland of skulls around her neck, blood on her hatchet and hands, thick breasts and thighs, and a shield of black hair.
through Kali, we can achieve “moksha,” meaning eternal release and liberation from the cycle of reincarnation.
My friends left, the flowers died, I drank all the wine. Nothing survives me, but nothing is designed to. Everyone is just a visitor here, even me. Still, I welcome the tourists.
