Results for: Feel good
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Here’s What I Learned By Choosing to Step Away from Productivity For a Whole Day
I did nothing “productive” for a whole day: no email, no phone calls, no work, no cleaning, nothing that fuels my inherent Capricorn desire to win at Capitalism. Here’s what happened.
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Sad in a Prettier Place
A big reason for my move was the fact that I’m immune compromised. Instagram’s creepy algorithm delivered me an image, “moving won’t solve your problems, you’ll just be sad in a prettier place.”
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My Word of the Year Was “Closer”
For as long as I can remember, I’ve held a silent tradition of closing out each year with a word.
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Top Surgery, Magnolia Trees, and the Trans Art of Letting Go
What’s transness if not a long lesson in choosing which beautiful things are meant for you?
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Ranking The National Songs by How Much I’ve Cried to Them
Trying to get sober was like pulling teeth.
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Is There Life After High School?
“I wanted to have nightmares about monsters or mass shootings. It was too embarrassing — in the midst of global catastrophe — to be concerned with something as frivolous as high school.”
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Grief Exists in Its Own Time Zone
There’s a reason people say things like “grief isn’t linear,” and “you won’t feel this way forever,” and there’s also a reason it feels like you’re hearing those things through a set of ear muffs when you’re in the moment.
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Empty Magic: Lunch
In my quest to destroy the body I had known, this new body was not safe from me either.
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I Used Instagram Mantras As Therapy — And It Worked
They served as daily messages your best friend should tell you when you’re hurting — and in desperate need of a silver lining.
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When Thin is a Trans Requirement
Body fat is central to how we perceive gender. So what does that mean if you’re a trans person?
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A Scrutinized Body Becomes Art: How Makeup Helps Me Manage my Body Dysmorphic Disorder
Often, use of makeup, especially as a way to cover up perceived flaws, is seen as a symptom of body dysmorphic disorder. But for me, using makeup is not a way to hide what I look like. Instead, it’s a way for me to be seen.
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How to Quit Smoking
Tell yourself that you’re not like one of those chain smokers, that you can stop whenever you want. Start smoking American Spirits, so it’s like, not even that bad for you because it’s natural, or organic, or something. You forget.
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Learning To Live After My Younger Brother Died
When I unexpectedly lost my little brother to cancer, I had to learn how to close out his unfinished business and live life again without him.
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A Birthday Party No One Else Was Invited To
The first time someone described Casey as having “stalkerish” tendencies, I defended her. For the most part though, I didn’t talk about it.
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Brown, Queer, Sad, Strange, and a Skilled Practitioner of Each
I found a different self slowly, learned to exist as if with many different goggles on at once. Always speaking from my mother’s kitchen in the Silicon Valley and, at the same time, my grandmother’s crowded living room in Punjab. In these years, I would feel the sharpness of many kinds of difference, marginalization. But when I looked down at myself for signs of why I felt so other, all I would find was the color of my hands.
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5 Years Sober (Or, the Meanest Lesbian I Know Punched Me in the Face)
“I knew that somewhere along the way, I stopped being sober for her and had started doing it for me — and that realization hit me harder than my own fist.”
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Beyond Self-Care Bubble Baths: A Vision for Community Care
If I and other people with certain disabilities are going to survive, we need care — and not from ourselves. Because when it gets really bad for me, self-care is literally impossible. In those moments, I need community care.
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Feelings Rookie: A Tribute to Love
When the world feels dark, we have to find the light where we can and hold onto it. This is a story about a bright, shining spot of goodness: My Granny.
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Feelings Rookie: The Terror of Hope
Hope is light, hope is all that is good, hope is what keeps humans alive when all other circumstances say they should be dead. So why was I so afraid of this life-giving feeling?
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I Never Meant for My Hair to Be the Way Back to the Lighthouse
“I thought changing something on the outside would change the wrecked ruin of me on the inside. I thought somehow the inside would get a memo from my outside and get into shape. It didn’t, but my hair is the first way I was able to gain autonomy over my body.”