Michaela Mitchell

Ah, January of a new year. Time to wake up a completely different person from the woman I was in 2015, including: 30 pounds lighter by February! I call bullshit.

In my family, it's not a matter of if cancer will affect one of us, but when. Right now, breast cancer has center stage in our lives.

You turn your back to deal with a crying toddler (I mean, answer a customer's question) and when you look back, every single shirt is unfolded and on the floor. Just at that moment, someone else walks by and rolls their eyes and sighs at how “nasty the store is" and wonders why they "can't they hire good people to keep it clean.”

God forbid a single group, like fast-food workers, attempt to unite and fight for a better living wage. The moment they do, stories about more deserving groups who don't complain about their income are thrown about.

My journey to acknowledging my guilt and privilege while embracing my feminist view on the world has been a slow, winding trip — with no end in sight.

Somewhere between the birth of my first child and the first time my youngest hurt himself and I told him to “walk it off,” I lost much of my mom guilt. It helps that a very good friend of mine, who'd already raised her children years before, shared some of her own hard-earned wisdom with me.

I have a completely common and certainly not surprising confession to make. Turning 30 freaked me out.

I've said before that I accept myself as I am, even though there are things I'd love to change about my body. And that's true. But it's not like I woke up one day and thought, “Yep, I'm great. My body is great. Life is great. Everything is great.”

How many times have you opened your mouth only to hear your parents instead? This happens to me all the time . . .

I can't decide which school of thought is more annoying. “Lose weight, get healthy, don't be a drain on society, and finally have the best, most perfect life once you're skinny!” or “Screw what people think! Be comfortable in your own skin! Don't ever change because change equals conformity!”