mental health

You can create boundaries for many things. For example, your communication needs (what works for you, what others need to know, what you can’t tolerate, etc.), your limits in the bedroom, or even when your employer or employee is allowed to call or text you. They can be established for romantic, familial, platonic, and professional relationships.

After spending a long time in nature, it stopped being intimidating. It started being calm. The quiet wasn't something I feared anymore. It was something I wanted to cherish.

When I’m in the company of family, my strongly held beliefs about positive body image, my carefully honed confidence that I am more than numbers on a scale, my uncompromising rebellion against the patriarchy and its arbitrary rules for women’s sexuality, crumbles into a fine dust that blows away with one heavy sigh.

The first step isn’t to admit I have a problem. I don’t.

Taking care of your mental health is expensive. What happens when you don’t have the means to seek the help you need?

So, I got an email from my brother yesterday telling me that he’s not coming to the wedding. “I want to be there,” he writes, “I really do, but the idea of being consigned to [our mother and her boyfriend’s] care for the duration of the trip is driving me mad. You know, the whole lack of autonomy and being on someone else's time and all that.”

...[B]eing among the dead rightsizes my problems, makes me feel small like staring at the ocean. After all, we are all being carried along toward the same inevitable fate as the men and women whose headstones I pass on my daily strolls. The best we can hope for is that someday someone will stop to calculate our ages and wonder about our lives after we’re gone.

I guess we are all guilty of gender-typing to some degree. It’s ingrained deep in our subconscious and culture. Everywhere we go: shopping malls, in the media, play groups, schools, public bathrooms — and the list goes on. But is it possible to shift the dialogue when it comes to teaching masculinity to boys?