Carrie Saum

For the first time in my life, I was lost after leaving Evangelical Christianity. I watched the shores of everything safe and familiar wash away.

I know it feels like you're falling apart. It's the kind that happens when I have overcommitted and then something goes wrong and everything else spirals.

Heating up a kitchen while you are doing your level best to not become human molten lava is always the goal during summer, no matter where you live. I prefer batch cooking if I can make that happen, and never, under any circumstances, do I turn on my oven. Unless I'm baking a birthday cake or maybe some hand pies.

I didn’t realize I was a polarizing person until my late 20s. I was raised in a tradition where being liked was extremely important — pivotal, even.

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By 13, I clearly understood: Thinness was next to Godliness, and I could never achieve either without extraordinary means. Jesus loves skinny people.

Thin Mints are my favorite. They’ve ALWAYS been my favorite. I would hide a sleeve in our freezer as a kid, and wait for my brothers to leave the house so I could eat them in peace. As an adult, not much has changed. I look forward to that time of year when Girl Scout cookies make winter doldrums bright again.

As a woman, it feels damn near impossible to be heard sometimes. But we are working hard at this life thing, and we deserve to be taken seriously. Here are five tips to get closer to that goal.

As white feminists, we have an absolute and undeniable responsibility to seek out perspectives of marginalized people and gain understanding.

Trail mix is a quick way to keep me from having a full-on hunger meltdown. I find it easier to whip up a batch of my own so I can control the ingredients and the quality.