Joni Edelman

Our relationship has been a little complicated. I've loved you a lot, and I've loathed you at least that much, but mostly you've just gone unnoticed. Except for those 5 to 7 days every four weeks when you made your presence quite evident, what with the river of life blood and the random excruciating, and from what I can tell, unnecessary, contractions.

Psychiatric illness is still stigmatized. And that’s hard when you have a psychiatric illness.

In today's HELLO, OBVIOUSLY news: National Coffee Day.

As long as I can remember having paid attention to the media, I can remember a woman's weight—or body in general—being a news story.

I'll let you in on a little secret - being thin didn't make me happy, but being "Fat" does! Be fat and happy. Be unapologetically fat.

I didn't get a lot of mothering as a child, but when I did, it was from her. She taught me how to sew, how to crochet. She taught me how to stand up for myself, to be tough. She taught me how to make fried chicken and fried okra, which I will never make, because it's fucking gross.

Look, I'm not saying McDonald's did this themselves, I'm just saying, a lot of the people that work there probably agree.

Are the advances worth the trade-offs? You be the judge.

It doesn’t get any more difficult to insult ourselves, regardless of how old we are. It would be ideal if it got easier to respect ourselves, but it generally doesn’t do that either. Every year you age, and every year the aging you looks at the you of the years before and thinks, I can’t believe I thought I was fat/ugly/etc.

...I’m going to help you! By “help” I mean “tell you all the things that didn’t work.”