We are always getting ready to live but never living.–Ralph Waldo Emerson When’s the last time you thought, “Once I get that job I’ll be happy” or “Once I meet that guy I’ll be happy” or “ Once I fill-in-the-blank I’ll be happy?” In his book “Happier,” Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the arrival fallacy – the belief that when you arrive …
While technology and social media have their advantages, a growing amount of research is proving that the overuse of both might be making us sick. Millennials (individuals with birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s) are the most digitally connected generation. When it comes to social media they are biggest consumers, …
Shame is the intensely painful feeling that we are unworthy of love and belonging. —Brené Brown To experience shame is to be fully human; to at times feel inadequate, insufficient, inferior, unworthy and even unlovable. While guilt is the feeling of doing wrong, shame is the feeling of being something wrong. While shame is most noticeably experienced the moment …
An obsession with the female form has existed for centuries across different cultures and geographic regions. An over-obsession with the female form without regard to personhood is self-objectification. Most of us are familiar with the idea of men seeing women as objects through behaviors such as catcalling or engaging in pornography, but what about women …
What It Means to Self-Objectify and How We Can Stop Doing It Read More »
Major depressive disorder affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, age 18 and older in a given year. I want to share some of the lies depression told me. I believe that clinical depression is a complex medical issue. It’s like an onion with many layers and each layer needs to be …
I was struck by this quote by my friend and Darling contributor Katherine Wolf from her newly released book Hope Heals: I imagine most of us have fairly straightforward pictures in our heads about what our lives will look like and who we’ll become. When something happens that is not inside the four corners of that picture we …
Detoured. Again. What To Know When You Just Don’t Know Read More »
I grew up with stories about life under my grandfather’s roof: the parties and drinking, the rage and fights. Grandpa would abuse amphetamines during the day and alcohol in the evenings and through the night. One night when things were particularly bad, my grandpa broke my Nana’s nose. My mom, a young girl then, called …
What I Wish More People Understood About Living Sober Read More »
In high school, you could say I suffered from a bit of social anxiety. At the grocery store checkout line, upon signing my receipt, my right hand would shake and I wasn’t able to look the clerk in the eye. In conversation with acquaintances or people I didn’t know well, I was always more concerned …
Denmark is the happiest nation in the world—according to studies—and researchers attribute Danes’ happiness to having low expectations in life. In other words, Danes have a non-idealized way of looking at the world. The happiness killer isn’t having ideals. Rather, it’s the power we give them. We can either be inspired by or imprisoned by …
