Bodies

I’m a fat brown girl from an immigrant family. I grew up learning that no one would ever love me because I’m fat. I was taught that I have to work twice as hard to get half as much. If someone looks at me weird or says something rude to me, I always see it or hear it and I have a massive (exhausting) anxiety/adrenaline rush/aggro response/comedown cycle. I feel like I have to fight to maintain dignity and humanity every, single day.

Many books in the self-help genre are either hokey or just plain scams. However, thanks to my perseverance and voracious reading, I've discovered there are self-help books out there that can transform your life and thinking in powerful ways and I’ve rounded up a list of my 5 all-time faves.

Undoing a marriage costs five times as much as it does to tie one up with a bow, and the paperwork is even longer. I've cried so hard I've thrown up my dinner in a municipal lot, exhausted myself with memories to the point where 7 p.m. seems like reasonable bedtime, and contemplated spending my wedding anniversary alternating between taking a pair of scissors or a lighter to my wedding dress.

The dictionary defines love as: a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. So if you want your loved one to feel loved it is about two things; what you do and what you say.

My husband and I are absolutely, madly in love. Yes. We have sex. We have it a lot. It is good. I am bigger than him but that doesn't matter.

Have you ever looked in the mirror and not felt good enough? Sometimes we give up dreams, hopes and love out of fear, negative self talk and pain. We rob ourselves of the only thing that no one else can truly give us: love.

The origin and implementation of the trigger warning is new-ish, showing up on the tumblr scene regularly around 2007. Born out of feminist blogging, the trigger warning was ostensibly put into practice to protect those who may find a specific topic to be “triggering” — most commonly sexual/physical abuse and/or eating disorders. I deeply respect the people whose experiences may warrant a trigger warning (including myself), and yet, I question the effectiveness of the practice.

Once I was a good Christian woman. I was president of the abstinence club; now I support Planned Parenthood. How did I go from an evangelical Christian upbringing to this total change of heart? Do I want to make Jesus cry? What happened to me!?!