There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

     — Saul Bellow

Almost every single food, diet, and gym commercial marked towards women stresses the importance of reducing calories and dropping pounds. Not a single one will ever mention the fact all women will look & feel healthier by gaining muscle mass & reducing body fat — an accomplishment that the hallowed bathroom scale will never reflect.

When I see my husband now, I don't see the optimistic idealistic boy with big dreams and great hopes I once married. I see a gentle spirited, patient, intelligent man who wears the same look of sorrow in his eyes that I have. It's easy to miss his hurt because he hides it behind a big smile and an easy laugh. But it's there. I see it.

Sometimes when you wave a $100 in front of someone, he or she will do anything to get it, even something knowingly harmful. Let’s stipulate that rich Americans flooding impoverished countries with millions of dollars to adopt its children will absolutely garner attention. Money has always been a magnet for corruption. While there are obviously lots of true orphans, without question, that much cash flow will generate some “created orphans” to satisfy demand, especially for babies.

We've seen other fish­er­men allow this kind of news to destroy them. For so many of us, our work is not a mere job. Releas­ing the dock lines, tilting our heads back to take a deep, salty breath, feeling our bodies become one with the sea and our vessels… We find ourselves whole out there, while we wander, incomplete, on land. Out there, we know ourselves in a way that, on land, we often aren't quite sure who we are or where we belong.

Years later, when my mother had mellowed and we had reached our fragile peace, I mentioned that day and she said, "Yeah, you should have had stitches but I took care of it."

Mom, you tried to scotch tape my ass.", "Yeah, you should have had stitches but I took care of it."

She laughed and said, "Well, that probably wasn't one of my best moments."

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To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value.

     — Claire Messud

At some point during this phase, I was crying on the kitchen floor for no reason. As was common practice during bouts of floor-crying, I was staring straight ahead at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about myself. Then, through the film of tears and nothingness, I spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator.

My daughter wasn't born into royalty, but she was born into a country where she can now vote, become a doctor, a pilot, an astronaut, or even President if she wants and that’s what REALLY matters. I wanted her to know the value of these amazing women who had gone against everything so she can now have everything.

Self esteem is sold to you as an inalienable right, not something to be earned; and if you don't have self-esteem it's because fake society made you feel bad about yourself. But fake society also made you feel good about yourself, it propped you up. The reason you got an A and not an R and believed it is because you actually believe you are an A kind of guy, Math, English, History, Science, PE, and Lunch notwithstanding. A, not R. But if everyone deserves it, it has no value. Which is why getting it is unsatisfying.

A pastor asked all mothers to stand. On my immediate right, my mother stood and on my immediate left, a dear friend stood. I, a woman in her late 30s, sat. I don't know how others saw me, but I felt dehumanized, gutted as a woman. Real women stood, empty shells sat. I do not normally feel this way. I do not like feeling this way. I want no woman to ever feel this way in church again.

7. Critics aren’t automatically bullies and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you ignore all of them out of hand. That being said, it sucks to read shitty stuff about yourself so find an honest friend to read your criticism and tell you if it’s something worth listening to or if the critic is just a crazy fucking douche-canoe.

Once we broke up, I gained again. I noticed my aunt and uncle seemed to be both super slimmed down and hyper alert. My grandmother suggested I ask them the secret of their dieting success. My uncle wouldn’t tell me but his wife, a giantess, looked me straight in the eye and said, "Drugs. Hard drugs."

You'd think it's innate — this ability to transcend the mundane and discover a second, more magnificent world within the one you've been taught to argue with. And maybe you do come with superpowers at birth but you lose them as your mind conquers your heart over time.

I realize that this will be an opportunity for some to write me off as someone who wasn’t righteous enough and gave in to the natural man. I have accepted that this may be something some people may believe about me no matter what I say in my own defense. Living authentically and openly is more important to me than avoiding any malicious or untrue statements that might be made about me because of choices made about my lifestyle.

I think the question is more about me than Park. It's — why did I make Park Korean? There aren't a lot of Asian boys in YA; the character calls attention to himself. Why would a white author write about an Asian guy?

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While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it's a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control.

     — Daniel H. Pink

Broadcasting distilled, emotional battle cries without background context to our entire Rolodexes is further polarizing us as a community. And aren't we polarized enough as it is?

I want us to speak in essays again, to connect compassionately over our differences, to listen, to be respectful, and to learn from each other. The fact that our audience has broadened to everyone we’ve ever met makes it that much more important to be real, human, and long-form about where we’re coming from and why we feel the way we do.

There is a tipping point when the work becomes exhausting beyond measure, useless. You can't pour antidote into a vat of poison forever and expect it to transform into something safe, something healthy. In some cases, poison is poison, and the only sane answer is to move on.

As the world seems to be falling apart, and social media introduces a new level of cacophony of misinformation, speculation, and downright venomous bile — we should ask ourselves, is what I am about to say better than silence? Am I adding anything to what's already being said? And possibly most importantly, is my desire to say it keeping me from listening to what is already being said. Because waiting for your turn to talk is not the same as listening.

Have I actually improved the silence?

After the birth of my second child, I started blogging and, again, had no idea why I was putting words on a virtual page to be read by strangers (if at all) but I did it and I am still doing it seven years later.

But blogging changed me. It helped me realize that every piece of writing is a story unfolding, that my life is a story unfolding.

And then the tears are rolling down your cheeks, silent and warm, and you hate yourself for it. Your husband comes up to check on you, see how much longer you'll be, and you duck into the closet, pretend to be looking for something. You don’t want him to see because he wouldn't understand, he couldn't understand. How could he ever understand how something as simple as getting dressed can make a person cry?

While it's not surprising that civilian photos are being used in an FBI investigation, the potential amount of raw footage under review may be unprecedented.

Perhaps I feel the written land of the upbeat is for others. My niche is here, in the agony of this disease. There is so much emphasis on "being positive" and all of that; I feel the compulsion to show the flip side, too.

The thing that is hardest to explain is that these jokes are coming from a position of privilege my white friends don't even realize they have. This social advantage is so ingrained in our culture that they aren't aware their comments are coming off the backs of centuries' worth of hardship and oppression. The tipping point for me was about two years ago, at a friend's house, when I was introduced as "The Black Friend." As my friend laughed off his statement, my heart dropped at this oversimplification of me as a person. I quickly realized that the joke was on me, and the punch line was my race.

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Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future — and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

     — Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

I wish every trailblazer had someone to follow, the way I wish every new mother had someone to mother her. This is the hardest thing about pioneering anything — this staring into the blizzard in bulky snowshoes with not a single neon sign or rabbit track before you. Just this swirling uncertain future. Trust. Hope. And the knowledge that there's no going back now.

It may seem surprising that I feel almost no apprehension about exposing my mental decline and my reactions to it. The value of my books on rural practice and on inner-city doctoring, after all, lies in my willingness to report candidly, so I have some experience in sharing the messy details. In my lecturing, speaking and teaching, I have tried to be open about my depression, believing that the millions of people who are shamed into hiding their diagnosis should have some models for self-revelation. Likewise, I hope that others with an early diagnosis of dementia and those who are in relationship to a person with dementia (including medical people) will find my experience helpful.

Words are small things, and yet they are everything. They are intention and action. They are the signposts that remind us to look within and begin change through small do-able steps.

It's not about tolerance, my loves. It's about living with compassion and understanding—for your world and its people—before ignorance or fear or hate ruin the view.

Always make the choice to look around the ugly to find the good.

...my primary problem with this Dove ad is that it's not really challenging the message like it makes us feel like it is. It doesn't really tell us that the definition of beauty is broader than we have been trained to think it is, and it doesn't really tell us that fitting inside that definition isn't the most important thing. It doesn't really push back against the constant objectification of women. All it's really saying is that you're actually not quite as far off from the narrow definition as you might think that you are (if you look like the featured women, I guess).

I’ve failed in competition; and I’ve succeeded in competition in equal amounts. Neither one makes you a stronger artist or a better human being.

Being successful in competition serves only to make you a better competitor.

Competition is not life. It’s just competition.

Things need time to settle down and clear. But now we don't have time for that. We have to find culprits, heroes, miracles and peace in the same moment as the event.

I wish you could have known her when she was 30. She was beautiful. She wrote poetry for the newspaper of her country's capital, Bogota, Colombia, a city even then of over 500,000. Her columns penned anonymously, all beginning with the same three words, A Mi Amante. To My Lover.

The Nipper has the Best Ideas Ever Invented. He said, last night on the way to rehearsal, "you know what would be cool, would be if they made a Call of Duty™ game that's age-appropriate for kids and they called it Call of Ducky..."

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You can’t tip your hand if you don’t know yet what your hand is.

     — Maile Meloy

Adjectives, especially, are words that have given up. They are in sweatpants all day. They are on the couch smoking pot while the nouns and verbs go to work.

The hope is that people think we're ok, so that's how we package ourselves. And, we're brilliant at pulling it off. A quick scroll through Facebook or Twitter will testify to that. Yet, all the while, a quick scroll through Pinterest will remind us at how much better packaging often is than the finished product.

I could hardly breathe as I stared silently at the floor. And then the lump that had been growing in my throat turned into tears, and the tears into choking sobs. Coming to grips with what I really thought of myself was like the floor giving way beneath me.

We seem to have an inexplicable need to box people up and categorize them. And in the end, we draw lines around ourselves; lines we turn into walls and walls that become our own closets.

We want to stay in your churches, we want to hear about your Jesus, but it's hard to hear about love from a God who doesn't love our gay friends (and we all have gay friends). Help us find love in the church before we look for it outside.

Every day, from morning to night, there are people who love you more than they love themselves. Even with your imperfections, your lack of patience, even without makeup, you are so loved.

In a truly open and democratic society, ideas, policies and legislation are exposed to scrutiny, debate and criticism. Information is shared freely. Governments support research that makes the country stronger by ensuring its policies are in the best interests of the people. A government that values its citizens more than its industrial backers does not fear information and opposition.

We live in strange times. Everybody gets to have a public opinion and 700 channels to share it on and I for one welcome our new Bedlam overlords.

But there is a strain of discourse rising in the cloud that is starting to permeate a great many of the conversations I happen on. It’s the idea that women critiquing men is oppressive and equates to bigotry.

The worst nightmare of my life has just begun. I loved my beautiful baby with all my heart.

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It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

     — Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

If I had my way, everybody would feel comfortable being who they are. Nobody would feel bad about how they look or however it is that they don't conform to whichever ideal is in fashion. People would eat greens and trot around enthusiastically and take their baby aspirin daily and be cheerful about their futures.

The other parents selected my table and the ones next to it. The dad was left alone, especially after his son got up to play with his teammates. Initially, I was a bit smug. After all, I was still angry. The other parents at the gym had heard about the altercation, and I was relieved that I wasn't an outcast.

But then, my heart softened.

I've been making origami off and on for forty days now, letting my fingers pray out little swans and sailboats and flowers and foxes, and I've learned some things: about reverse folds and crimp folds, about trial and error, about patience, about retracing steps and following directions, about forgiveness, about letting go, about redirecting some of my anxious and self-focused energy into purposeful acts of creativity and healing, about building bridges, about asking for help.

I've been thinking about the issue of cosmetic surgery and body modification... and am stunned to discover that I now really, really love this old body of mine. On the surface, my body is in bad shape. It is morbidly obese, has crippling osteo arthritis and spondylitis, has needed a hysterectomy, appendectomy, gall bladder removal, numerous operations on deformed feet, fusion of the cervical spine, two hip replacements, carpal tunnel surgery, and has allergic reactions to substances too many to list. What has taken my breath away is the realisation that, in spite of these handicaps, my body has brought me so much joy.

Here's how I do it: Whenever someone says "God," I add an "o." God becomes Good. I was born without the gene required to believe in God. I have tried and I can't. Good is something I believe in. Good is something that is real. I can see it, I can feel it. I can give it and I can receive it. Good is tangible and I believe in it. So I sit in this meeting house and I pray to Good.

She said, Do you really think that courage always feels like a cape flapping in the wind on a mountaintop? No. Most of the time it feels like fear and trembling.

On a different view of history, a cyclical one, the future is not uncertain at all. It is coming back around, and causality is built into the circle, not into past events. You don't need to look for causal chains to explain an uncertain future, because the future is known. Truth, on this view, is about what matters, not about what happened. Truth is about what we can make useful, not what we can make a theory from. We don't need theories, on this view, we just need stories.

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A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

     — Junot Diaz, O Magazine, November 2009

Failed Derby Girl shares the secrets of the mothers of the superheroes, the givers of milk.

There's more to everything, and worlds within worlds.

While all are entitled to their opinions, no one is entitled to say I'm not a person. Or that I’m not a decent person. No one is entitled to lie and make shit up just to suit his fears.

Shame diminishes our capacity for empathy.

Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.

You can’t depend on empathetic connection to make a campaign effective, then crush the needed empathy with shame.

For years, since my son died suddenly and unexplainably in the middle of the night, I have told anyone and myself I wasn't afraid of dying because I'd already lived through hell.

Turns out, when it's 3:35 am and I can't breathe, I'm damn scared of dying.

Sometimes we have to do a big re-wiring job on our brains. We have to first notice those limiting beliefs — the ones that hold us back from being our true selves, our deepest selves + our shiniest selves. And then we have to say, No more! That belief no longer serves me. It no longer keeps me safe, it actually keeps me down.

We keep shifting our framework of understanding rape culture — first to women for being drunk, or skimpily dressed or being out at night, then to a specific culture and if all else fails, to the security system of a nation. I am not saying nations are not responsible for the safety of their women (and men). They need to make tough legislation and more importantly, find ways to stringently implement the law. But we need to expand and correct the framework as well, as there is an inherent danger in understanding rape in the framework of culture and nationality rather than the actual reasons of maintaining a patriarchal order and plain discrimination resulting from racism.

We need to remind ourselves that this issue isn’t being put before the church. It’s being put before the Supreme Court and I, for one, am thankful that our country was founded in a way that how someone else feels or believes, doesn’t affect my right to live my life the way I choose.

From my first glass at age thirteen, alcohol helped me feel more comfortable in my own skin. Being a little numb helped me fit in and feel less awkward and insecure.

But alcoholism is a progressive, insidious disease.

Like the faithful who believe happiness lies in the divine delivery of some miracle or other, objectifying happiness has made time-traveling automatons out of most of us. Depending on our bank balance, we either live in a past when we had stuff or in a future when we will, negating the present and all the mindfulness, contentment and gratitude that would probably come with it if only we stopped wanting for just a moment.

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I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

     — Kurt Vonnegut

On my last trip home, just before Christmas, I took him on his final jailbreak. I threw him in a wheelchair and rolled him through 20 degree weather to his favorite restaurant, where I watched him pick at his waffles and bacon. He couldn't have had more than four bites over the course of an hour. It was a very clear signal to me that the end was near. I took him, for the last time, to his house. I gave him his percocet and sat him in front of the TV. He held the remote in his right hand like a six-shooter, splitting his attention between the TV, the view of the lake through the sliding glass door, and me. It was wonderful. We sat that way for over three hours.

We have been practicing for this for a long time, for being the ones who help. Remember when we were in the middle of the knife fight on the subway and we got the other mom and kid out of the way? Remember when we helped my friend move away from her scary husband? Remember all those times we took pictures of those freaky dudes staring at the little kids at the playground? We've been practicing to step in and help someone else. You can do it. I have faith in you.

My kids said goodbye just the same way they did every other day and I didn’t emphasize to them that it was the last one. I know the significance though, and my heart breaks at the thought that they won't get to spend time with her again. I was happy that just before we left, the kids sat quietly in chairs next to her bed and talked with her more calmly than they had all week. Maybe they did know, in [their] own way, after all. In the car, after we left, Chris said, “So, is that it?” and for him, it was.

This device, which Obama has used on more than one occasion, is reductive as hell. It defines women by their relationships to other people, rather than as people themselves. It says that women are only important when they are married to, have given birth to, or have been fathered by other people. It says that women are only important because of who they belong to.

The flip side to the excitement is the burnout. You're exhausted, and you’re never really "off." You get called out of a sound sleep to drive out to a crime scene and try to talk with surviving relatives. You wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, realizing you've misspelled a city councilman's name. You spend nights and weekends chipping away at the enterprise stories that you never have time to write on the clock.

Everyone works so hard for so long and for such little compensation. The results are dangerous.

Someone asked me today, "What is 'rape culture' anyway? I'm tired of hearing about it."

Yeah, I hear ya. I'm tired of talking about it. But I'm going to keep talking about it because people like you keep asking that question.

The fastest growing religious movement in the United States is American Exceptionalism. It's easy to see the appeal. The belief that a country founded on Imperialism, Racism, Slavery and Civil War is actually the greatest democratic country on earth and given Divine Right to be so, that America has absolutely no responsibility to history, and thus has no obligation to address deep inequality, is an alluring one.

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Does the devil know he is a devil?

     — Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Disability and visible difference can be confronting because people are not used to seeing and experiencing relationships with disabled and visibly different people. They see visible difference and disability in the media and assume hero status, or a life to be pitied (like in those awful Facebook one like = one prayer memes), or worse — a villain status (think Harvey Dent's disfigurement in The Dark Knight). And too often, people without disabilities are playing characters with disabilities — 'spacking up' as Stella Young puts it. (Just writing that term has put the Fleetwood Mac song You Can Go Your Own Way in my head forever.) We just don't see enough real disabilities and visible differences (without scar makeup, I mean) in the media, so there's no fair representation of disability in society.

I am much luckier to be born curious and to a somewhat open globe, a time when the infrastructure exists in such a way that I can stand looking at Charcot’s badly chosen anchorage and a week or so later, sit on my couch in Seattle writing about it.

You’ve been taught that if someone thinks you’re too fat, or too loud, or too smart, or too dumb, or too whatever, or not enough whatever, that they get to have a say in how you feel about yourself.

So I’d like to introduce you to the deep spiritual practice of

Not Giving A Shit.

This morning I decided to make a green tea fruit smoothie because I had a large quantity of frozen fruit. This is not rocket surgery. You put fruit, green tea, honey and lime juice in a blender. Then you paint the ceiling with the smoothie when you accidentally turn the blender back on after Husband removes the lid.

I want to be clear: I can say, without reservation, that this is the worst book contract I have ever personally encountered. Not only would I never sign it — which should be obvious at this point — I can't imagine why anyone whose forebrain has not been staved in by an errant bowling ball would ever sign it. Indeed, if my worst enemy in the world was presented with it and had a pen poised to scratch his signature on it, I would smack the pen out of his hand and say to him, "I hate you, but I don't hate you this much."

Now I've made my way back onto land and we're tumbling down the rabbit hole of new relationships, marveling at the little things we never knew to miss. A hand extended, breakfast left warming in the oven, an accidental integration of lives.

There’s music class again this week. And lady, I'm going to say hi, like it or not. And I'm going to smile. And I'm going to be friendly.

And if you don’t say hi back, I’m not going to think about punching you in the face and it’s all going to be okay.

I sure am glad the doctor who "treated" my daughter the other night got to protect his ethics. Now how about we get busy protecting people’s lives? How about we talk about systemic ethics? How about we talk about treating suffering that originates in the brain the same way we treat suffering that originates in the heart, the liver, and the bones?

Moms, the kids are all right. It's the people trying to convince us otherwise who are in desperate need of attention.

I was surprised to realize I had forgotten about myself. In a way it's good to know that I can step up and nurture if needed. In another way it’s scary that I could morph so quickly into someone for whom self-care becomes news. If I was a nurse I would be the chain-smoking, tequila-drinking kind. The pill-popping kind who is fine, fine, until she isn't. What happened?

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Do some homework to find out what these people really want. I’m not talking about deeply hidden motives; usually the true goal is in the public domain. You just have to look at what the people said before they were trying to sell it to the broad public.

     — Paul Krugman

I know it probably sounds like I'm throwing all this out there and blathering about how I'm all better and got through it, without adequately explaining how. And the thing is, I can't map out anybody's journey for them — we all have to find our own way through the spiritual forest, so to speak. But there is a way. You can trust me on that. If there is a will, there is a way.

Since I've never been able to still my thoughts enough for meditation, swimming is the closest I've been able to get to it. The smell of chlorinated water signals pleasure to my brain — a Pavlovian response. The 50 meters length at Hamilton Fish is a blissfully long stretch to swim without having to turn. Plenty of time to enjoy the sight of the sun ripples in the turquoise blue water and as you turn your head to breathe, the dark green gingko trees that frame the lifeguards in their orange suits under their orange umbrellas. The rhythm of my strokes and the sound of the bubbles of my exhaling breath, gets me to thinking in a slow and focused way.

Advocates attempting to remove the hatred from the clinical term "retardation" and eradicate altogether the pejorative "retard" are on the right track. They are launching and perpetuating a much-needed dialogue about how we tend to throw those words about without thinking twice about those who are hurt the most by them.

And much like it is on our walks, the room will quiet, the splashing and the screaming and the cups being flung into my face by tiny hands — and all I will hear are those seven little words, softer than a whisper, harder than a squeeze.

Claudia tells me that yogis measure their lifespans in breaths rather than years so they live long lives. I don't know. Is that true?

But then she uses the turtle as an example. Some turtles have lived over 200 years. That means there could be a turtle now that actually watched Thomas Jefferson have sex with Sally Hemmings. A turtle breath can last for an hour. My breath lasts about three seconds. I should really slow that down.

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