Erin McKelle

Staying in the present moment has been shown to have many positive benefits for your health and well-being, so it's no surprise that mindfulness has become such a popular practice.

I feel like indirect communication is a common thread amongst women. Since women are socially conditioned to not make a fuss, ruffle any feathers or have permission to speak our minds, indirect communication becomes inevitable. Or conversely, if we communicate directly, we’re often labeled in a negative manner, like bitch.

That’s exactly the spirit that word should embody: someone who is loud, proud, and an advocate for themselves. Someone who stands out and is bold and beautiful for it. Someone who is unapologetically themselves.

I am a recovering serial dater who is now single and actually enjoying it.

I firmly believe that every person on the planet could benefit from therapy. I myself have been going to therapy every week for about four years and don't plan on stopping.

My fears of dependence were so potent that I decided to quit meds for good. Though I didn’t just throw away mental healthcare, mind you, since I had been, and planned on continuing to go, to weekly therapy sessions. I wanted to find other ways to manage my mental illness without popping pills on the daily.

This year I’m going into the holiday season with a self-care game plan, so that I’ll be ready when the holiday blues come around. I think that probably more people get the holiday blues than you would think, since this isn’t an issue that’s often talked about openly.

I began to see my mental health go completely downhill. This led me to seek out a psychiatrist, who raised an interesting concern: she thought my birth control was messing with my depression. It’s not like I hadn’t been aware of the link between hormonal contraception and depression before, but it never occurred to me that these two personal realities could be connected.

Here are a few ways you can do some inventory on your own behaviors and start dealing with addiction in a healing way.

Just like you might find it difficult to fly while fat, going to the gym can also be a terrible experience to endure while fat. This is one of my favorite points to make when people justify their fatphobia with “I’m just concerned about their health.”