What do I know

I am petrified of social media. In the past I have:  - gone private when I feel like I'm getting too much attention  - deactivated my account before a controversial story is published  - actively refrained (with 80 percent success) from posting about holidays and friends and highlights that would misrepresent my life. Broad strokes, these are my reasons: I don't like being seen by so many people with such little context. I don't like how people get social brownie points by pulling each other down. I don't like the extreme emotions. I don't like the things people infer from posts and use against each other.  I definitely do not like the noise. I don't like it. But I am comfortable sharing thoughts and feelings. In fact, that's how I process them. Writing is my process of understanding. I am able to speak out the different forces in my head. I am able to see myself without judgement. It made perfect sense for me to write and share now: I've been

The best metaphor to explain pain I've read is this: the nerves are the reporters on the ground sending valuable insight to the brain about what is happening. The brain is the editor who interprets those signals. The pain you feel is the op-ed published in a newspaper. I'm very, very early in understanding the literature on pain, but I do understand that it is an opinion the body is screaming out to you as a messenger of last resort. Pain is the body saying, hi hello ladies, whatever you're doing is not working out for me. This is serious. Pain is body saying, pause, take stock, introspect. Ask why. Ask what. Editors sometimes underplay stories, sometimes over play stories, sometimes completely misdirect you. Only the rarest editor gets it bang on. Such is the business of pain. Your brain could be telling you you're on fire when you're not, your brain could be telling you it's nothing when you're on fire. You're probably doing both. Eventually

I have not worn a bra for three years now. When I tell women this, they inevitably ask me about the logistics of living life without a bra. How do I contain my boobies? I don't. I do what men do: I put on a shirt. Here's a little story about how I got here, why this is not revolutionary at all, and why we have all been scammed. *** The women in my family are quite petite; you know, the kind who did "I must I must increase my bust" exercises in school. I was not like them. By very early puberty it became apparent to my litany of body-shaming aunts that I was an early-developer. This was a source of tension between my mom and me. My first memory of this is when I was eleven. My brand new breasts had emerged over the summer, and I was dragged off a tennis court by her because I'd "forgotten" to wear a bra. (I hadn't forgotten, I  was pretending. I think she knew this.) I remember not understanding why. The next memory I have is of watching