Melissa Petro

There was nothing easy about recovery, but it helped that living the trainwreck lifestyle had stripped me of everything. Within sixteen months, I was unemployed with no job prospects, barely scraping through my last semester at school. I was drinking every day. Sex with classmates had led to casual encounters which bottomed out at trading sex for cash, something I spent a whole lot of time justifying.

If you missed my weekly column this summer all about getting engaged and planning a wedding, here’s the highlight reel: after doing

After gaining as much as forty pounds and pushing a cantaloupe out my vagina, I wondered: will my body ever be the same?

It's time to talk substantively and honestly about how sex work isn't any one thing.

So, I got an email from my brother yesterday telling me that he’s not coming to the wedding. “I want to be there,” he writes, “I really do, but the idea of being consigned to [our mother and her boyfriend’s] care for the duration of the trip is driving me mad. You know, the whole lack of autonomy and being on someone else's time and all that.”

“If someone’s crying at work, it’s because it’s their only outlet to release tension,” says Greg, age 30, a public school teacher. When people cry at work, Greg says, it’s because they’ve became “overwhelmed” or perhaps feel as if “they’re not meeting their goals.”

Sure, "friends forever" sounds nice. In theory. But sometimes it's better that two people just not be friends.

It's pretty well understood in 12 step programs that "who you see here and what you say here, stays here."

Arran and I joke that no one wants to go to a wedding, not really— and maybe that’s true, but (perhaps naively) we had thought of the day as a gift to everyone involved, including ourselves.

My relationship with my father was never father-daughter picnics. Maybe when I was very little — or maybe this is less a memory and more of a wish — I have an image of myself as a very little girl sitting on my father’s lap, and we are both laughing. Perhaps my father enjoyed fatherhood when his children were very little, but that joy seemed to curdle into constant frustration as my brother and I grew up.