Lisa Marie Basile

My happiness is what undid me, ironically. I worried so much about being OK with the happiness that I fell apart.

It’s Monday, 6 a.m. and Sarah, 30, wakes up — as she does five days a week (but really, it’s seven, because the body is a fickle thing).

When the spread was published, all the girls in the shot were small — small enough to notice their not-bigness. It was the first time I felt “othered,” the first time I noticed how some versions of thin weren’t thin enough.

When we think of foster care or wards of the state or orphans or homelessness, we hear poor. We hear the forgotten. We hear hopeless. We hear other. Let’s face it: we hear classism, trash, bad parents, drugs. The stigma cuts through the room, through the world, through the news reports we don’t read — and through our bodies.

So let’s get this out of the way now: Imagine not coming from a relatively typical family background, not having enough money to go on school trips, and knowing the structure of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and watching your mother at the podium. Imagine going from homeless shelter to foster care, and imagine your main source of support as a teenager wasn’t your mother or father, but your social worker or your foster parent — a stranger, for all intents and purposes. Imagine keeping all of this quiet, because there’s no way high schoolers could ever understand. This was my life. Now you know.

What do you do when your workplace is so toxic that it makes you sick? How do you take action then? What happens when you have nothing left to give?

This is the one time of year, Scorpio Season (Oct. 23 to Nov. 22), when getting a little closer and looking a little deeper is, in some ways, inevitable.

The older we get, the harder it is to make close friends.