Minds

How do you love someone who continually does things to hurt himself? I’ve been holding a phone with my stoned, sobbing brother on the other end for nearly 20 years. I keep picking up the pieces, keep having my heart break, because he’s my brother.

I never wanted children. When other little girls were playing with dolls, I played with stuffed animals. Even when I played house, my home was filled with plush puppies.

I told her in graphic detail about my binges, about the amount and type of food that I forced into my mouth long after I was full, about the lengths I went to to make sure that what I was eating was as unhealthy as possible, maximizing the damage I could do to myself.

“Are you a cutter?” the medical aide asked me, gearing to strap a blood-pressure monitor around my upper arm to take my vitals at 11 o’clock one evening.

...self-care is a process. Ideally, you treat yourself with kindness daily, engaging in acts of self care that function as either a reminder to relax in the midst of everyday stresses, part of a life saving regimen to sustain your mental well being, or a little bit of both.

Pretending you’re OK when you're not is lying — lying to yourself. And it will keep you not OK.

I don’t want your green smoothie recipe, your yoga pamphlet, or your Google search results on the meds I take.

The first time I remember learning what a safeword was, I was sitting in my college dorm, devouring blogs about kink and BDSM. It all seemed so foreign to me, a teenager who couldn’t imagine real people doing any of the taboo things these blogs talked about.