“you have to be vigilant about keeping your own fire alive”

Advice from My Eighty Year Old Self

A wonderful piece: On Kindness: My mother is sick, by Cord Jefferson

Powerful: “The phone rang. It was my college rapist”: a true comic

Image: Pablo Picasso, postcard to Jean Cocteau, 1919

Just read: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (some spoilers ahead!). For the most part I loved this book. Pulled me in quickly, well paced, I didn't guess the ending too quickly, and the author does an incredible job of creating the tense, lost, confused atmosphere of the drinking problem and depression suffered by the main narrator. Only one star off because it was sort of insane at the end that basically everyone was evil, or at least both men in question turned out to be sociopathic abusers....jeez. A little much? But overall a really good read, I see why people are calling it the new Gone Girl.

Header: source.

“Please be gentle with your body. It loves you more than anyone or anything in this world. It fixes every cut, every wound, every broken bone, and fights off so many illnesses, sometimes without you even knowing about it. Even when you punish it, it is still there for you, struggling to keep you alive, keep you breathing. Your body is an ocean full of love. So please, be kind to it. It’s doing the very best it can.” - Your Body is an Ocean (Nikita Gill)

“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” - Audre Lorde