Jenni Berrett

At some point intellect has to make room for something bigger, for something scarier than just about anything. In order to truly learn something, you have to be vulnerable. You have to walk in and set your broken parts on the table and say, “Here, fix it. Or at least be broken with me.”

"...Mental illness isn’t that exclusive. It doesn’t care how your day is going."

My dad died. I only know my own grief, and even that is debatable. If you’re hoping to comfort someone who’s grieving, here are a couple of things to know.

More than any other unsolicited mental health advice I’ve received over the course of my life is the admonishment to “fake it till you make it.”

"I had always pictured myself spending afternoons studying there. I instead found myself curled up on one of those benches at five in the morning, promising the crises hotline operator that no, I did not want to kill myself. I just didn’t know who else to call."

[CN: vomit] Having been an unfeeling, sluggish husk of a person with the nap-taking skills of an elderly sloth for the past five months or so, I have reemerged too tender for this world.

Culturally speaking, though, it’s pretty much set in stone. Even if I left the church entirely, there’s no getting out of my heritage. Cut me open; I’ll bleed funeral potatoes. I’m what you call a “legacy Mormon” — my ancestors migrated across the frontier and settled in Utah (then Mexico) after facing unspeakable persecution from countless communities in the United States. You probably know my ancestors best as the people with the wives.

Is laughter the best medicine?

Part of me wants to write this off as innocuous and carry on with my day, because homophobia is already everywhere and there are better things for me to dedicate my words to — but then I remember 10-year old me.

"Disease takes the body over, and, in the cases of the diseases we vaccinate for, moves swiftly on to other bodies. It does not ask permission to enter. "