Matt Joseph Diaz

This week Matt reminds us how amazing we are.

From a young age, people (especially women) are constantly taught that we’re in competition with one another. Whether it’s our grades, our social status, our economic status, or those creepy beauty pageants for 6 year olds, we’re immediately thrust into a world where we’re taught to view everyone as adversarial to a certain degree.

Taking the time to find clothes that I liked, to dye my hair, and get tattooed — for the first time I was building a place of my own.

When I lost that ability for a while, being too weak and swollen to really put the effort in, it felt like I’d lost a part of myself. It felt like I’d regressed, like I’d gotten to the finish line and was forced back into the race.

This is the trap we fall into when we discuss recovery, emotional development, mental health, or body image: believing there’s a destination.

Being unable to post photos of funny signs outside of bars or live-tweet bad reality TV had more of an effect than I'd anticipated.

Once I became a body positive writer and speaker, I told the story of that night on podcasts and in interviews as an example of the sort of reaction I was afraid of prior to my video about my excess skin going viral. Every time, the interviewer made a comment about how Dana was “the ugly one,” not me. And every time, I told them I didn’t want her to be vilified or insulted.

Everyone messes up, so you can bank on future opportunities to apologize. When the time comes for owning up to your own mistakes, these tips will help ensure you make the most of making amends.

How embarrassing is this story, and is the value in it (be it entertainment, educational, or both) enough that the benefit in sharing it outweighs how mortifying it is?

People who live with mental illness are aware of how our brains work differently. Because of this, we constantly go the extra mile to try to validate what we’re feeling within ourselves before even considering voicing an opinion out loud.

As much as you want to believe people are all the same, we don’t have the luxury of being seen as the “default” in the same way white, straight, cis people often are. We don’t have the luxury of dismissing our painful history and systemic issues for the sake of everyone getting along, because we’re still in the middle of them.

If I get into a heterosexual relationship and spend the rest of my life with that person, I will still be bisexual. I will still feel that attraction to the man on the other side of the bar, even if I’m in love with my partner who happens to be a woman.