catapult.co

Briefly, I was part of that mysterious organism, a biological family; no one cared about my virtues or my bad behavior.

I didn’t know, anymore, how to date like a normal person — how to give a potential relationship the space to grow into the family I dreamt of.

The more I wrote about girls and women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.

Sometimes I thought of it as war reparations. On the outwardly civil but quietly vicious battlefield of my parents’ divorce, I had been the clear loser.

There are no spontaneous romantic trips abroad if you have a Kenyan passport. No whisking away to France for that perfect Parisian engagement, no eat-pray-love self-discovery in India on a moment’s notice.

In 1920, when a baby was born under two pounds, the mother would be told, “Go home,” as in, appreciate the brief span of this life outside the walls of this hospital.

I felt humiliated singing a song about honor when I could only feel shame. As I stood in yellowface, I had finally fulfilled my quest to become white.

Our lives are lived online, and to ask us to exist homogeneously across all platforms and networks as trackable subjects is a cruel twist of the internet’s potential.

When my grandfather threatened to kill himself, I began to wonder if, as he sees it, he has effectively stopped living.

I used to imagine having a Korean mother, someone rich in stories and jokes about Korean food and culture. My Korean mom would, ideally, be Maangchi.

Beauty and its pursuit can be art, a delight, a terrific party. But a party you must attend every day isn’t a party at all. It’s an unpaid job.

If citrine is supposed to help bring you abundance, what might it bring if you didn’t need wealth?

There will be as many different iterations of this storm, and the ones to come, as there are Houstonians. And we have to hear them — they’re what will determine our map for the next one.

Remain forever hungry, or enjoy the tried-and-true? Sometimes, I learned, it’s okay to double down on the life you have.

What Dr. Jerri Nielsen and other women have sought in Antarctica, in history and in imagination.

When a work environment turns toxic, leaving can be the best option — even when you’re in your dream job.

I have been afraid most days of my life, which is what anxiety is, and the months of this pregnancy have been the most anxious of my life.

Maybe telling ourselves we’re balanced, that we’re in control, is almost as good as the real thing.

As predictive genetic testing becomes more common, more people will be faced with the knowledge that something inside our bodies might be working against us. But what does that mean?

“I need a new way to eat,” I say. The nutritionist nods and says, “You want to lose some weight while we’re at it, right?”