Adiba Nelson

Then we had that talk that made my eye twitch: the budget talk.

This was how my eating disorder began. This is when I first consciously ate my emotions. THIS is when I said, “I don’t need you to love me. I don’t need to love myself. I don’t need to feel or be felt. Hear or be heard. See or be seen. I just need to eat. I just need to eat because food will never judge me. Food will never leave me (unless I make it leave me, which I did. In college. A LOT.).

Where did you even get that statistic from? Did you make it up?

I don't love this. I don't love any part of it. I don't love the fact that a life is in my hands every moment of every day.

If 93% of the Academy is White, but as of 2014, only 62% of Americans were White, and art is supposed to imitate life...

She unleashed a whole new level of #blackgirlmagic that I did not even realize I needed. And honey, if I didn't realize I needed it, well then hell, you know the world just wasn’t ready.

It was the weirdest thing. I looked at this tiny human and felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. No overwhelming joy at finally meeting this person I’d been so excited for in months prior, no lurking sadness about no longer being pregnant and relishing in those shared “inside mommy’s belly” moments. Just... nothing. My brain said, “You have a baby now,” and that was that.

That man shakes me to my core. Actually, not HIM, per se, but the people who blindly follow him. The out-and-out bigots who will call me the N-word just as easily as they’d call their buddy “Bob.” The people who SWEAR they're not bigots, but support him because they believe in his promise of new jobs and deportations.

It is made up of women that I've known since I was 8, and women I met last week.

My job is to make you feel — whether it’s lust, pride, anger, guilt, joy, sadness — whatever it is you feel, I want you to feel it.