Browsing Tag

choices

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, Pregnancy

Hole

September 17, 2018
hole

By Rhea Wolf

Forgotten already. Absorbed in the mystery.
Into the egg, I come. A mother,
Another one for the
turning, another one for the
wheel, under the ground,
burning waiting resurrecting
falling, singing the long high note and
descending Oh Phoenix oh fire walkers
now I am red and hot inside with
a fractured other,
many wishes,

and a fantastic losing mind.
Thinking those men
think it means enlightenment
but they are still free.
Making big scribbles and smoking sacred cigarettes
losing their minds to art and science,
while they are still free.
And my petals don’t fold out anymore. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Relationships

And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

August 5, 2018
miles

By Matt Jones

The night before the Half Ironman, I can’t sleep. I am nervous about the 70.3-mile race. I am exhausted from traveling from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Austin, Texas, from months of training and weeks of waiting for something to end that has scarcely even begun.

On the morning of the triathlon, I feel less alive than animated by raw anxiety. My parents, who have driven three hours up from Houston to watch the race, help me change into my wetsuit. It’s a little past 6:00 AM and the sun isn’t up just yet. The first leg of the race, the swimming portion, starts at Decker Lake. The gun sounds, and we enter the water by the dozen, so in the beginning, we are all over each other, kicking and colliding, fighting for space. Every few strokes, I lift my head to make sure I’m still going the right way and not careening off into the horizon—though would that be so bad? In many ways, I am already far off course. Despite the buoys and the red flags bobbing at the lake’s surface, I have entered uncharted territory. Even though I theoretically know what lies ahead, I am struck by a feeling of uncertainty. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, healing, Health, Young Voices

Choices

June 15, 2018

By Kelsey Brey

My life has been abuzz with talk of “choices.”

So and so either made or did not make a choice to end his life depending on whom to talk to, or what train of thought you best find yourself hopping aboard. A good friend of mine wrote about how he was told as a child that he could be anything. I imagine most of us were, even if not by our parents-we were indoctrinated with this message from the educational institutions we attended. “Choose to shoot for the stars and if you fail, you land among the moon” said the poster in my elementary school.

Choose to attend college, choose to have that fourth, fifth, sixth drink.

I wanted to write some well worded prose on what it means to be lied to by a society where the choices are already made for us, and choosing to not choose only alienates. Choosing to go against the grain isolates. But, now I’ve gotten to this point and that idea is losing its appeal for me. Continue Reading…

Eating Disorders/Healing, Things I Have Lost Along The Way, Vulnerability, writing

Survival. By Jen Pastiloff.

May 1, 2014

By Jen Pastiloff.

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black


I often think about the choices we make as humans and about how sometimes those choices, seem futile, naïve, masochistic. Un-human even. How sometimes, they lock us into a life we never imagined. You may want to pound your head into the wall (as I have done) upon looking back, say, at the choice to stay the night with an ex-boyfriend, who, when you ask if he can give you a ride to the Philadelphia airport the next morning, says, with a breath full of alcohol from the night before, “I’ll give you a ride to the airport for a hummer.”

The choice as to whether to give him a blowjob in exchange for a ride was simple one. Continue Reading…

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