Results for: be the change
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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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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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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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Bipolar Disorder, Trans Dykes, and Celestial Catastrophe
One patient in the study “Observation of Trends in Manic-Depressive Psychosis” by O. Spurgeon English recounted that living with bipolar disorder “is like opening all my pores on a cold day and subjecting myself to catastrophe.”
I too have felt like a catastrophe of a person, a catastrophe of a star, a catastrophe of emotions. -
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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Marching at the End of a Very Long Parade: On Being A Queer Alcoholic
I got sober alone, in a village about an hour north of Kampala, Uganda. I had moved there for a job opportunity, naively confident I, as an openly queer person with a mental illness, could flit across the globe like a moth. By the time I quit my job and scheduled an emergency move back to the United States, my drinking was threatening my life.
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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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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.”
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Sad Enough Songs: On Julien Baker and Depression
Depression is not forever because it always ends, and depression is forever because it always comes back. It won’t work if I only want to stay on the days when my brain breaks through the muck. Turn Out The Lights is a meditation on wanting to stay on the very worst days.
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Feelings Rookie: Hopping Off the Plane at L.A.X. With a Dream and a Cardigan
Fitting into Los Angeles wasn’t going to happen for me. Or so I thought, until I stopped trying.
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Feelings Rookie: Letting Anger Light My Fuse
I like to think I can control my anger, but I usually end up burning my own life down instead.
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Winter Is Coming: Diary of a SAD Girl #1
“Time Change Sunday is my personal gateway to hell. It gets dark earlier (and then earlier and earlier). It gets cold in the morning and night (and then stays cold all day and all day). I stay inside to keep warm and then I stay inside because I don’t want to leave and then I stay inside because I can’t get out of bed.”
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Panic and Parenthood: Having A Baby, Being Torn Apart, and Putting Myself Back Together
“In one of my college psych courses we had to try to use conditioning to get rid of bad habits. My classmates tried to stop biting their nails. I tried to stop panicking during sex.”
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The Vagaries of Love: How Poetry and Queer Movements Give Each Other Names
For National Poetry Month, an ode to the queer poets who talk about their love, fight for justice, and helped me save myself.
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Me, Piper Chapman, the Psych Ward, and the Incarcerated 2.2 Million
“Real human change requires space to be honest with yourself, honest with others; a space that doesn’t exist when you’re trapped by necessity behind a fortress of self-protection. As the inmate Poussey in Orange replies when a correctional officer pressures her to speak openly during a group therapy session: “Does it ever occur to you that actually feeling our feelings might make it impossible to survive in here?”
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Some Things Are Impossible: How A Rural Queer Lives With Depression
“Farm work was everything my depressive body was screaming against: sunlight, physical activity, and tiny symbols of the fragility of life all around that I couldn’t remember how to value.”
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The Big Reveal
“In fact, the strain of hiding my illness would likely have caused me to break down with even more frequency. How would she have coped with those dysphoric, hallucination-ridden breakdowns — and how would I have dealt with her uneducated reactions?”
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The Ersatz Emancipation of Femininity: On Being a Bulimic, Brown Lesbian
“When I was thirteen years old I began starving myself. I did so, in short, because I wanted so desperately to be thin. And by thin, I mainly meant white.”
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Schecter 3:16 (Or How Jenny Schecter Saved My Life)
“I was angry. Really fucking angry. Angry because Jenny Schecter was right.”