Category: Prompts

A prayer for the dead

October 26th, 2026

What’s a song that changed your life?
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In spring of 2024, in the middle of the day as I was going about my life with my three little kids, I received an out-of-the-blue Facebook message from an old friend from college.

At the time, I hadn’t spoken to “J” at all in a couple of years, and even then, it had been just a few scattered, stilted messages; we hadn’t actually hung out or really spoken since 2013, when we were college students in the same Catholic campus ministry group.

Back then, we were attending different schools (he, liberal arts, me, fine arts), and he was a couple years older than me, but somehow, almost immediately, we clicked. Neither of us were the type of college kids interested in idle mingling or meaningless fun — we both were the type of serious, anxious, melancholic introverts who needed to discuss deep, heavy, intense topics, and we were also both writers and converts to Catholicism. Some friends, when you meet them, it’s like you can feel your souls recognize each other within a few minutes of talking. And you know you’ve found something special. It’s a rare thing. Long after we fell out of touch, after college, I thought about him daily. Letting that connection lapse was one of my most painful regrets.

So you can imagine how happy I was to receive that message from him that random spring day.

In the following exchange of messages, he revealed to me in conversation that he was in the process of converting from Catholicism to Russian Orthodoxy. I was floored, to say the least; he was one of the most devout Catholics I’d ever known, and one of the most knowledgeable. How could he be converting away? And why?

J was happy to indulge my curiosity. He was a gifted teacher, and had a way of speaking that sounded like the most elegant prose — probably because he was such a voracious reader, and read so many books, so many old, difficult, hefty, important books. I learned a lot about Orthodoxy from him, in those weeks and months. He taught me about the theology, ecclesiology, history, and iconography of the Orthodox Church, as well as some of his favorite saints (St. Paisios, St. John Maximovich, St. Metushka Olga, St. Seraphim of Sarov…) and, of course, introduced me to some Orthodox chant.

Even though I wasn’t interested in converting to Orthodoxy myself, I did enjoy learning about all of this, especially the music. And J loved that I was interested, loved having an opportunity to talk about this stuff — as a convert without an Orthodox community anywhere near him (three hours from the closest church!), he felt pretty socially isolated, even more than he had as a Catholic, living in a small town in the Deep South. He eagerly shared with me a list of selections from his chant playlist on YouTube, along with his own little description of each chant and what it was about.

One of these was the Evlogitaria of the Dead.

This one, he told me, had a special place in his heart. A friend of his had died not too long ago, and he was deeply worried about her soul, and told me that he’d prayed this for her immediately after learning the news of her death — one of the first chanted prayers that he’d ever attempted. I pressed play and listened to the Evlogitaria. It was interesting, but, it wasn’t my favorite. It felt a little strange, I thought — and kind of creepy, actually. I preferred the beautiful Agni Parthene, which is a prayer to the Theotokos, and the chill-inducing Pobedna pesma (Song of Victory). Gregorian chant is awesome, too, of course, but there’s something about Eastern chant that really cuts into you.

It was an interesting foray — for both of us. Later that year, J had a change of heart, and ended up returning to Holy Mother Church. He went to Confession and resumed his life as a Catholic, while still maintaining a love for Eastern spirituality and practices.

To say I was happy about this is an understatement. All felt right with the world. I had my Catholic best friend back. The one who’d first helped me learn about God and His Church was now a practicing member of it again! A void in my heart, empty since 2013, had been filled and was flowering. When I found out I was expecting my fourth baby, I asked J to be Godfather, and he accepted with great solemnity and honor. I’m not someone who has a lot of friends or makes friends easily, and as a convert from a non-Catholic family, Catholic friends are even rarer. I treasured my rekindled friendship with J, always excited to see a notification from him, always looking forward to his every message. I was always eager to share things with him as soon as I heard about them. Any Catholic news or experience or question, any cool TV show or interesting story, any philosophical dilemma, I needed to process it with him. He made me feel connected to the world, in that way.

About a year after his return to Catholicism, he got very sick. He told me he wasn’t feeling well, and a couple days later messaged me that he was in the hospital with pneumonia. I wished him a smooth recovery and shared my hopes that he’d be feeling all better by Christmas, which was two weeks away. Just days later, I found out that he had died.

.

How to even process that?

I’m not an emotional reacter. I froze up. I didn’t know what to do. I think I just kind of stood and stared into space for a while.

At some point, though, I remembered something. A memory materialized in my mind. The Evlogitaria of the Dead. The one that meant so much to J, that he would use to pray for the dead, even after he was Catholic again. I dug up the link and pressed play.

And there he was. I heard him. It sounded of him.

And that was when I think I began to process.

For some time, in those early days, this was the only music I could listen to.

I still play it all the time now, at least weekly, or hum it to myself sometimes, anytime — always for him. Losing a best friend sucks. It’s been ten months, and I still have that same need to process every experience, every problem, every bit of news I hear, with him. How can he miss this? How can this be happening without him? — It really is like a piece of myself, of my reality, has just been cut away. Things are simply less real, now. Everything is just less.

He’s a little closer, though, whenever I play this song.

(To know more about J, as I wish everyone could, you can see the longer post I wrote for him after his death, here.)
A thing I never thought I could do

October 21st, 2026

What’s something you’ve done that you never thought you could?
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I never thought I would be able to have kids. Let alone five of them.

“Having kids?” you might be saying, skeptically. “Are you dumb? That’s so basic! This is supposed to be an inspirational prompt about people achieving hard things! Literally any woman can get knocked up and pop out a baby!”

— first of all, if that’s your impression, ha! I highly, highly recommend you go have a nice little chat about that with any woman who would like to have kids but whose body has difficulty conceiving, or maintaining a pregnancy to term, or delivering babies — there are tons of them out there! You likely already know a couple! — and they will certainly set you straight. “Any woman can have kids” is so far from the truth.

And besides, have you ever researched just how many fine details there are to the process of conception? I’ve heard some biologists even say it’s nothing short of a miracle that any babies are ever conceived and born at all, with how many precise little details need to be exactly aligned at exactly the right time in order for a human to be conceived, let alone a healthy, “normal” one.

But even besides any of that. Even before I knew any of that — because I really didn’t know much about babies or reproduction, beyond the bare, middle school sex ed basics, before having kids of my own, and like most people just assumed that if a man + woman had unprotected sex they’d probably have a baby, in normal circumstances — even before I knew any of the actual science of fertility, I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to have kids. I just knew it.

For several reasons. If at age thirteen-fourteen, basically right after the onset of fertility, you develop a persistent ED that keeps you underweight for nearly all of your teens and twenties, you will probably lose your fertility. Because in case you weren’t aware (because many people aren’t! Another popular misconception!), being underweight is not healthier! If you are a female of childbearing age, being in starvation mode actually stops your body from ovulating. Which means: no cycles, which means you’ll spend the entirety of your teens and twenties infertile, and will come to believe that this is just life now.

Indeed, I remember a family doctor telling me early on, when I was still in middle school: If you don’t start eating, it may ruin your ability to have kids one day. To which I, who at that age delighted in being just soooo cynical and jaded and grim, rolled my eyes and replied that I didn’t want to have kids anyway.

See, I had consciously decided to adopt that antinatalist point of view as part of the effort that I made, as a way to cope with the alienation that I felt in middle school as an adolescent with undiagnosed AVPD, to adopt a “dark,” “edgy,” “alternative” persona and presentation. See?, I wasn’t awkward, I was just antisocial! Not painfully shy, I just “hated people”! See?, I didn’t care. Being a misanthrope was so much cooler than just sucking at making friends. — Suddenly, I went from a weird and tomboyish but basically good-natured girl, who dreamed of having a husband and five kids one day (I had all their names picked out!), to a wannabe-punk poser begging my mom to buy me Hot Topic so I could attempt to look like Avril Lavigne (because, come on, she was soooo punk rock 🙄).

When at such a formative age you make such a concerted effort to convince yourself of a certain reality, it unfortunately takes root in you. It sinks into you like a poison. So that even after you get over your wannabe-alt kid phase, you have long since accepted, somewhere along the way, that you just aren’t the type of girl who could ever be a mom. You are bad at people-ing. You are weird. You’re not feminine. You certainly aren’t one of those “maternal types.” You don’t really know how to interact with a baby.

I just wasn’t that type. To this day, none of the girls I mingled with in middle school/high school have had any kids — not a one of them! Same with my husband. None of his friends, to this day, have kids. (We’re late thirties/early forties, for reference.) We were just never the types to have kids. We didn’t even associate with those types of people.

And if in addition to the ED and the being-a-non-maternal-tomboy stuff, you also had a drinking problem (fueled by the aforementioned undiagnosed AVPD), that’s going to mess things up further. It was like I just could not for the life of me seem to figure out eating and drinking (it sounds so dumb, when you put it like that, lol, the two most basic human functions; what, did I have an oxygen use disorder as well?! — Pathetic!).

Underneath it all, this whole time, I wanted very badly to have kids. But pretended I didn’t, because, well, I believed it was impossible for me, so to admit the reality of my wanting, that would have been too much to live with. And too embarrassing, to aspire to something so “basic”, when all your life you’ve been told you’re so “smart” and “gifted”! I had no choice but to pretend I didn’t care. Which bottled-up sorrow only exacerbated the drinking, which exacerbated the ED patterns, which further damaged my physical health, & etc.: vicious cycle.

So, it isn’t until you’re moving in on thirty and the old biological clock is ticking louder and louder that you finally have to admit: there’s only one thing you had ever really wanted out of your adult life. Everything else — the pretense of Going To College so you could eventually Get A Cool Job, was all a sham. Hell, you never could have even told anyone exactly what that “Cool Job” was supposed to be. Because you never actually wanted a career. You finally have to confront that.

Which meant you had to get real: the vicious cycle could not continue, if you and your husband were to get intentional about wanting a child. You were in no condition to try to be a mother. All this time, you’d hoped that it might happen accidentally, so that you wouldn’t have to feel responsible, so that you would never have to own your feelings of inadequacy or change your behavior. (I’m very passive, not a fighter — I’ve always preferred for things to just happen, to fall into my lap. But at almost 30, it was evident that that tactic wasn’t working out.)

So, you had to restore your health. Or at least try. Thus, you begrudgingly took your last (God willing!) last drink ever, and began to focus on eating healthfully, and pretty soon found that, lo and behold, your body actually functioned just the way a woman’s is supposed to, when she’s not starving. And a few pounds and a couple months later, to your utter shock, you find you are pregnant for the first time.

So we had to move to a new house, since we were living in a rather icky little apartment at the time. What size house to shop for? — Small is fine! It’ll just be the three of us! I got lucky enough to have a kid — me, against all odds — the prospect of another one after that seemed so laughably remote! No, I’d long ago told God that if I could just have one, just one of my own, I’d be satisfied, and that was the truth; I simply didn’t have room in my brain to think about the possibility of additional kids. And it stayed that way… right up until an hour or two after my first was born. I looked at my husband and was like I think I want more.

That was six and a half years ago… and now we’re expecting #5.

You might still be sitting here thinking “eh, big deal.” And you’re entitled to think that — please, enjoy the privilege of your ignorance! But any other woman out there who’s ever longed to be a mom, but believed it impossible for her, and felt anguish at watching all the other women around her get pregnant left and right — she will be able to relate to me. She will understand my utter astonishment and wonder at how I found myself here. And how bizarre it is. I, the person Least Likely To Be A Mom, am soon to be a mom of five — just like I envisioned as a starry-eyed preteen.

There are still moments, almost daily, when I am struck by the sheer unbelievability of it: that I, of all people, should have ended up in this life. I was supposed to be doomed to a childless life of retail slavery until death. That was the fate I always foresaw for myself, aimless as I was while trying to pretend I didn’t feel called to motherhood.

And here’s another big surprise. Turns out it doesn’t really matter if you’re not a maternal type. Turns out, with your own kids, it is different. They are not like other people’s kids. They are the best, most important, most deserving people you’ve ever met. (And besides: plenty of “maternal types” go on to not be biological mothers at all, like some of the nuns who belong to my religious community and attend our parish; I’ve met several who are way more feminine and affectionate and caring, in general, than I ever was or will be.)

“Still not a good answer to this prompt; having kids isn’t hard work” — suit yourself, if you enjoy thinking that! I can assure you with confidence and glee that I don’t care if you think that. I’m not a fighter, but I’ve had to fight, in one way or another, for each one of these kids. Having kids has never been “just a thing that happened to me.”

In fact, I genuinely pity those who don’t see motherhood as a life that’s divine and meaningful and worthy of the utmost respect. Society loves to push this idea that only dumb and useless women become moms, that moms of many kids are basically livestock and tragically oppressed by the patriarchy — while all the smart, talented, enlightened, and worthy women go on to have careers and make money. I’m so sorry for all of those still laboring under this delusion. It almost got me, too. Luckily I was saved from it just in time. But why me? Of all the more deserving people?

It seems so unlikely, all of it. I really believe that God must have great designs for my kids, to pull such strings to make sure that they were born. I wish I could send this post to younger self, but alas, I’ll have to just hope that maybe it will reach someone in a similar predicament, who might benefit from reading it.
The promises that we make to ourselves when we are young

October 13th, 2026

What’s a country that’s at the top of your bucket list?
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How was it for you, being nineteen? Were you happy? I at nineteen was very much not, but was trying very hard to convince myself that I was. The year was 2009, and it was springtime: the spring of my freshman year of college. I was spending it on a study abroad trip to Germany with the other German majors.

It was a group of twelve of us students: nine young men and three women, and our department head: a brilliant man whom I rather idolized in an intellectual way, but who I’m pretty sure was disgusted by me, at that time. They all were. Everyone was, even my own parents.

And rightfully so. If you read this blog, you’ve probably heard me refer to my “Revenge Fat” or “Revenge Ugly” phases, by which I mean certain phases I’ve gone through with my ED in which I gain weight on purpose and/or stop taking care of my appearance as like an act of angry rebellion against the tyrannical voices in my head. These phases always follow severely restrictive phases, like the pendulum swinging violently in the opposite direction. It’s always a very sad way to live, and thankfully I haven’t fallen into it again for a long time (come to think of it, not since buzzing my hair off in 2015); the pendulum has gradually slowed to a manageable middle ground. But the worst and most definitive episode of Revenge Fat was this time in early 2009.

I was straight up gross. I’m not implying that all fat people are gross, because they are absolutely not, but I certainly was. I’m not a naturally heavy person, I don’t carry weight gracefully. At my highest weight ever, sweaty and smelly, just eating all the time with reckless abandon and telling myself I was “free.” (I won’t go into the whole history of all the events that led up to this episode; suffice it to say that, although I am still mad at myself for it, I also don’t think it was entirely my fault — I’d had a certain mentor in 2008 who gave me (and many others in her care) some very poor, dangerous guidance, when we were in a very vulnerable, mentally-susceptible place; but that’s a story for another day.) I was fat, on high doses of Zoloft and alcohol and just so much food, dousing myself in heavy perfume and heavy brightly-colored glittery makeup and draping myself in cheap costume jewlery and telling myself I felt so pretty, while also wearing baggy sweatpants every day, because they were the only comfortable thing to wear. They allowed me to forget.

In retrospect, nearly twenty years later, I can actually feel somewhat grateful that I went through this wretched stage. For a few months there, I got to experience life as a fat woman. So now, unlike many normal-sized women, I know firsthand what it’s like to be treated as subhuman and invisible and not a real woman. It’s subtle sometimes, this discrimination — I vividly remember, for example, my professor’s inadvertent grimace as he turned his face away from me at a restaurant, and the way salespeople in shops would act like they couldn’t even see you, the way people talk down to you without meaning to — but it’s very real. Almost twenty years later, and having never been actually fat again since that brief period of time, I still haven’t fully recovered my identity; even though I haven’t been actually fat in a really long time, and it was such a short period of time, it makes a permanent impression on you, being treated like that. The little ways people make you aware that you are disgusting to them. I may be thin now, but I think I’ll always identify as a fat girl, because of that time.

So, this was where my head was at, while physically I was on this fantabulous six-week expedition to the south of Germany, alongside eight rich frat boys, one fat nerdy mildly-autistic boy who was the laughingstock of all the other kids, two rich beautiful sorority girls, and one brilliant, athletic professor who was my hero. Even the nerdy boy, who was kind and pleasant to me, made it plain to me in conversation, in his innocent autistic way, that I wasn’t like the other two girls on the trip and could not be treated as such. (Randomly, my other main memory of him on that trip: he wore “toe shoes,” those weird rubbery “FiveFinger” walking shoes; Google it, if you don’t know what I’m talking about; he and his weird toe shoes were the absolute butt of everyone’s jokes the whole time; probably they were saying the same things about me and my sweatpants, though.)

Also grossed out by me was my host family: a middle-aged mother and her two beautiful, stylish grown daughters, living in Bayreuth. Aware of how disgusting I was to them, I didn’t like being around them, despite how friendly they were. So in my free time in the afternoons after class at the Üniversität Bayreuth and a hefty lunch at its cafeteria, I’d go for a lot of long walks around the city by myself with my headphones in. (It was on one of these walks that I wandered into a tattoo parlor and got my left eyebrow pierced, on a complete whim; that was my life then.) Headphones, Zoloft, stuffing my face, stuffing it down. Everything was fine. I was so free.

I often walked to the Hofgarten, which was mere blocks from my host mother’s house, and one of my favorite spots that I’d discovered on the whole trip. Maybe because I discovered it on my own.

Have you ever been there? It’s a big green park, a peaceful green oasis in the city, with curving pathways, little bridges over ornamental streams, lush flower beds so perfectly well-maintained that they feel native; shady mature trees; and at one end stands the eighteenth-century palace with a big fountain out front. A little paradise, a postcard from every angle. I was always there alone, invisible, listening to my tunes, people-watching. It was an escape — but it was also a moment of clarity. Alone, at the end of the school day, with the emotional aid of my music, I could actually take some things carefully out of the sealed mental box and look at them, and study them a bit.

I remember one overcast, wet afternoon — the snails were always out in spades, on those post-rain afternoons, big fat garden snails clinging to the foliage, much to my delight — it was one of those afternoons that’s gray and bright at the same time, the sky a flat sheet of pale gray, the sun hidden but its light everywhere. That kind of weather feels protective, makes you feel safe. I wandered out from the shade of the trees into the brightness in front of the ornate Rococo palace. Such a romantic place. I stood at the fountain, looking all around. No one else was there, on that overcast weekday, at least not that I can remember.

One day, I thought then, one day when I am happy and have found the right person, I will come back here with him.

It was a little promise that I made to myself and kept quiet about, but didn’t forget — still haven’t forgotten.

Eight years seems like not much time, at all, now; but it felt like a very long time, like lifetimes even, elapsed between spring 2009 and spring 2017 when I finally got married. To a guy with, coincidentally, a German last name and German heritage. Obviously I’d still have loved him even if he had an unfortunate last name, but I really lucked out, name-wise, as a former German major and a Germanophile in general. Germany has just always appealed to me, for so many reasons. I couldn’t have been more excited to change my last name.

He’s never actually been to Germany, though. Maybe one day we’ll go there, and maybe even stop at the Hofgarten Bayreuth, but, funnily enough, it doesn’t feel that important anymore. I no longer really care as much about international travel; I’ve seen very well that wherever you go, there you are, and life is just life wherever. Some places are beautiful — so what? Is it really worth all that money to drag yourself all that way and go “wow, this is pretty”? I dunno. I no longer feel bound to this promise I made myself. And besides, my husband is more interested in seeing Japan, if we ever do travel internationally, so that’s at the top of the bucket list, now, above Bavaria, and I am more excited to make this dream come true for him than to check off some little box on some mental list that some dumb fat nineteen-year-old once wrote.

That’s the thing — it stops being about my bucket list, my happiness, my this and my that, when you’re actually finally happy; it becomes more about your. I probably wouldn’t have understood that back then. I didn’t understand a lot of things. I wish I could say I forgive that younger version of myself, for all that, but tbh that’s probably still a long way off.
TOP 10: Cartoon Characters I Have Loved

September 8th, 2026

Daily writing prompt
Who is your favorite cartoon character?
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… I bet you can’t guess who my all-time favorite cartoon character is. It’s not like I make it painfully obvious on my WordPress profile or anything.

So, the real ones, those who know their early-90s animated films, already know who #1 on this list is going to be.

But there are at least nine others also worth mentioning:

.

Cartoon characters and I, we have a long history. Going all the way back to early childhood, I’ve had these phases of intense obsession with certain cartoon characters.

I think this fictophilia is connected to the AVPD in some way: fictional figures are easier, less dangerous, to love; in the safety of your imagination, they can’t hurt you, and you can’t fumble it with them. Imaginary worlds are the only places where it’s safe to experience strong emotions. I’m sure many of us socially anxious nerds out there can relate.

But the catch is, made-up characters can still hurt you — when they’re not your own.

Because you have no control over someone else’s intellectual property. You might daydream about it, you might wish you did, but you don’t. Thus, when you love a fictional character, there’s still a risk. You don’t get to decide what happens to them in their story. You have to wait, with bated breath, for the creator to release new content. You’re reliant on an outside source for canon information. (Unless you’re into fanfiction, I guess, which I, being a fierce individualist, have never been; with exactly two notable exceptions, I’ve always looked all the way down my nose at fanfic; be original, if you’re going to create something; don’t steal someone else’s characters, ffs!) You can’t just access their world at any time — you can’t have any actual agency in the character’s “life.” And besides, all the other fans have just as much right to them as you do. You have to share them. You never get to own them.

I didn’t like that. It made things too stressful, for me, too roller-coastery, too unpredictable. Made me feel helpless and weak and needy and pathetic. I hate being dependent. Also hate sharing what is deeply important to me — no, you can’t love this character too, they are mine! I hate being a trend-follower.

So, I came up with the best solution: OCs.

My own fictional people to obsess over. And now I make the rules, and am not a slave to any creator but myself.

And it worked! Beautifully! Since the inception of my fictional world in early 2003, I haven’t had any more intense obsessions with other people’s characters. Only mine. I am free. I am alone — the sole member of this little fandom, with no one to geek out about characters or new content with — but, I am free. And I get to decide what is canon now!

There are still characters that I’ve greatly enjoyed, though. Not all of the characters on this list are ones with which I had one of my signature pre-2003 intense obsessions. Some of these, I just think are super cool. Even though I’m no longer subject to such obsessions, I still have a lot of love for animation/illustration and fictional people in general. Anyway — I’ll explain more as we go along. Without further ado:

10. Buzz Lightyear. I’m no Pixar fan, not anymore, and it honestly pisses me off that they are still making Toy Story sequels — shamelessly milking every last penny out of that dried-up franchise that they possibly can, instead of coming up with original ideas — disgusting. But, Buzz couldn’t not make this list, because he was my first love — my first real crush. My first cartoon obsession. I was in first grade, and the original Toy Story had just come out, and I was as in love with Buzz Lightyear as a seven-year-old could be. I had all the merch, the action figures, the sweatsuit — it was my Whole Thing. Even then, it had an unhealthy element of intense shame. I was afraid for people to know how deep were my feelings about Buzz, but also longed to talk about nothing but him every minute of the day, which was a very isolating sort of feeling. It felt like a proto-addiction. I don’t know why I was already like this at seven years old.

9. Clopin (the puppet guy from Hunchback of Notre Dame). He became my next obsession after Buzz. For years, I thought something was very wrong with me, psychologically, for finding Clopin so strangely attractive — but in recent years, I’ve learned that I’m far from alone! There are lots of girls out there who salivate over him! He has quite a fandom! What is it about him? In real life, I’m not into skinny twiggy guys. But Clopin has a certain weird charisma for sure. Second-grade Mith was not the only one who noticed, after all.

8. Rei Kashino from the manga series MARS. This was 2004, so the post-OC era; thus I never developed an intense obsession, but this series came pretty close, and got under my skin way more than media usually does (and, tbh, had quite an influence on my fictional world, which I’m ashamed to admit can still be noticed in my writing to this day). I’ve said it before and will say it again: this is the best manga of all time, and Rei and Kira are two of the most beautiful characters ever drawn in the genre; they’re everything that the stars of a high school romance should be. Plus, it has that ’90s aesthetic that I’m such a simp for.

7. Trent from Daria. Again: not a serious obsession, but I always loved this show, and Trent was my favorite male character. How I longed, back in those days, for a lazy stoner band guy of my very own. I was as infatuated with him as Daria herself was. (Interestingly, she and I both actually ended up with well-adjusted, wholesome, intelligent, literature-loving Good Guys.) My favorite female character on this show?: undoubtedly Sandi. “GEE, QUINN 🤨” is something I still repeat semi-regularly to myself, when the situation merits it, because her accent was just so hilarious.

6. Johnny, the Homicidal Maniac. This is such a gross, terrible comic book series, and I no longer have any love for it at all, but when I was in seventh grade I thought it was just sooo extremely ~Edgy~ and ~Dark~ and ~Punk Rock~. 🙄 Nny was, in fact, my last major cartoon character obsession; it was the unbearable emotional turmoil of that particular phase that made me realize I couldn’t do this anymore, I had to get some OCs of my own. The secrecy, the irresistibility, the maddening weight of it. I won’t even go into detail about the great lengths that I went to to obtain a copy of the Director’s Cut — my parents, obviously, didn’t want me to have it — and to keep it a secret. It’s truly embarrassing to admit, now, but there was a time when I thought Johnny C. was dreamy as heck and fantasized daily about being the only person in his life that he wouldn’t want to kill.

5. Miguel and

4. Tulio, from The Road to El Dorado. Obviously, I mean, come on. These guys were my 4th-5th grade obsession. DreamWorks knew exactly what they were doing here; this movie had no business being so sexy.

3. Izaya from DRRR!. I discovered this one in 2018, so well beyond the era of my youthful obsessions… but, this came pretty close to mirroring that, and if I’d found the show/manga prior to 2003, I just know it would have become a Whole Thing. Izaya specifically is the magic ingredient that makes the series so much fun; he is the best anime villain of all time, and he and Shizuo are my favorite anime couple (I know the creator has said that they’re not in love, and I know I said above that fans don’t get to decide what’s canon, buuuut, yeah, in this case, sorry, Shizaya is canon.)

2. Invader ZIM. My second-to-last major cartoon obsession. And before you accuse me of being some kind of trend-following HotTopic scene kid, know that I was there when it began. I watched the ZIM pilot not the Friday night it aired, but two nights later when they re-aired it on Sunday night (April 1, 2001). Immediately it became a Whole Thing. I was 11, and positively indignant that no one (in the show or irl) took Zim seriously, no one else understood him, but I saw him for what he really was, I respected him, he and I were made for each other, we would take over this miserable planet together! I was extremely secretive about this obsession, to the point where I’d literally build a privacy tent by draping a big blanket over my head + the family PC (or my head and the TV, while standing like 1 foot away from the screen) to watch ZIM or look at pictures of him on AOL. So that the family wouldn’t see what I was doing. It was all I cared about, and I lived in constant, sickening fear of being found out. Again, I don’t know why I was already like this at such a young age.

And finally, my favorite cartoon character of all time:

1. Batty, of course. Batty was never a Major Obsession of mine, never a crush or anything (even I’m not that weird, haha!) but actually, that makes my associations with him even more positive, because, as mentioned, these obsessions were always riddled with so much fear and angst and shame. No, Batty has been a constant; he’s always just made me happy when I see him, happy when I think about him, and as a vegetarian/vegan/supporter of animal rights and a generally tense, anxious, mistrustful, creepy, and weird person in general, I’ve always strongly identified with him as a character. I’m never getting any more tattoos, but if I had to get one, it’d be of Batty for sure. Plus, as you guys know, I’ve loved rap music from an early age, and Batty Rap was one of the first rap songs I loved — it is to this day probably the hardest song in any kids’ movie ever. I mean come on:

… So yes, there’s that; now you all know how weird I really am. Whatever. I’m in the back half of my 30s now and happily married to a real life flesh-and-blood human person, and wouldn’t have it any other way, so, go ahead and call me whatever you want. If I cared anymore, I wouldn’t be posting this on my blog. If somehow you are still reading this and can actually relate to any of it — hi! we should be friends.
The Worst Book I’ve Ever Read

September 5th, 2026

Daily writing prompt
Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?
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Why yes, WordPress Daily Prompts! There is a book that I regret reading! I read it six years ago, and still think almost daily about how much I regret reading it. An absolutely despicable trash heap of an excuse for literature. Seriously — may as well bind up a bunch of used bathroom tissue between two covers and call it a book. Buckle up folks!

(– oh, wow. Now I actually feel kind of bad writing this. I just Googled the author to see if he was still alive, because if so I wanted to begin my post with a quick little aside directed at him personally, to say that I mean him no offense; my revulsion and horror at his book is a clear sign that he accomplished his goal to a T, and he’s actually a very gifted writer; he set out to write something despicable, gross, and nightmare-inducing, and did so perfectly, more memorably than anyone else I’ve ever read. I was going to write him this little note, here, and then saw, upon Googling, that he apparently died earlier this year. I had no idea. May his soul rest in peace.)

The author in question is one Dan Simmons (1948-2026), and the horrible book of his that I regret reading is Song of Kali.

Have any of you ever read this? If so, then you know what I’m talking about. If not, then don’t read it — especially if you’re a parent.

Why did I even read this book? I don’t usually go for dark horror. (I do enjoy some fun paranormal horror sometimes, like a bit of Stephen King, but not the heavy/grisly stuff.) The reason is, my husband and I were looking for a book to read together, as we often like to do, and a coworker of his, knowing that my husband likes horror, recommended this Dan Simmons book. We didn’t know what to expect, but decided to give it a shot.

I am going to spoil this book for you (TW), because I don’t believe it merits not spoiling, so, stop reading here if for some reason you actually plan on reading this piece of garbage.

The baby dies. An eight-month-old baby girl dies brutally. Why, I still wonder, did my husband’s coworker recommend this book to him, knowing that he had an eight-month-old daughter at home at the time? FFS.

Sometimes a tragedy in a book is good, is meaningful. Sometimes it’s earned. This one… was not. Everything leading up to the death was horrible and miserable, and the death just felt like: “oh wow, okay, we’re really gonna stoop this low now.” It wasn’t even the thrilling, exciting kind of horror. It was just dreary and miserable from start to finish; not a single moment that made you feel like any of it was worthwhile. Horror should at least be fun, imo.

“Well, that doesn’t mean dark horror is bad, Mith, it just means you don’t like it.” Wrong! If Song of Kali is a good example of “good” dark horror, then the entire genre is objectively shit and anyone who believes otherwise needs to see a psychiatrist.

If you’re going to make your audience straight up miserable from beginning to end, you’d better have a very good reason for it (exhibit A: the movie Calvary). “Look at how horrible I can make you feel” is not a good reason.

The other thing that pissed me off about Song of Kali was, it left a really bad taste in my mouth for anything relating to the beautiful nation of India. I’ve always appreciated India (some of the best vegetarian cuisine in the world!), which was one reason why this book appealed to me at first. The novel focuses on an American family’s trip to India, and is very much about India, and dwells a lot on the sensory details of its scenery, cityscapes, customs, and culture — always casting it in an extremely unappetizing light. Making the whole country look like one big nightmarish circus sideshow. I think if I were of Indian descent, I’d be downright offended! It’s a truly unflattering portrait of a perfectly decent country. From the time I read this book, for a long time, any mention of anything Indian gave me the major ick. (Until I discovered this absolute gem of a song, that is; thank you to this artist for singlehandedly healing my India trauma.)

Well, that’s enough. I’ve already wasted too much time on this book. In conclusion: Song of Kali is trash. No offense to Mr. Simmons, who clearly was a sick genius of some kind. I wish him all the best, but, dear reader, if you value your time and/or your inner peace, do not read this book. I’m still mad about the hours of my life that I wasted allowing myself to be tortured by this book for no reason.
“Eat Healthy”

August 31st, 2026

Daily writing prompt
What’s a conspiracy theory you actually find believable?
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The older I get, the less trusting I am in general. Like, all through my twenties and into my early thirties, I felt pretty sure that the government genuinely had our best interests at heart — why wouldn’t they want the best for all citizens?! They themselves are citizens, after all — and that their recommendations could be trusted.

Ha! Things are a bit different now.

There are a number of conspiracy theories that I find believable, now, which most of you would probably laugh at because “science,” but really, isn’t “believing the science” just as much a matter of faith as religion? I’ve never seen an atom or been to outer space. I wasn’t there at the dawn of life on earth. I’m just taking The Scientists’ word for it.

But one of these theories in particular, I’ve been dwelling on a lot in recent months, and I have become increasingly convinced of its truth. The theory is: people, especially poor people, are being actively, deliberately poisoned via our food supply.

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I remember some time ago hearing about someone who believed that popular, mainstram nutritional recommendations were BS. That all of the “eat fruits and vegetables!”, “fresh produce is the best thing for you!” advice, which is drilled into our heads from infancy, was propaganda and lies. That the “Food Pyramid” / “MyPlate” stuff, which encourages eating mostly vegetables and fruits, was an evil government scheme to make people unhealthy.

Hearing about this person’s outlandish conspiracy theory, I laughed. “That’s ridiculous,” I thought. “That’s crazy! Everyone knows fruits and veg are the best foods for your health. The Science says so.”

But a seed had been planted in my mind, and I couldn’t forget about it.

As you guys know, for a while now I’ve been researching and reconsidering the whole vaccine issue, and have concluded that the antivax position is more compelling than I originally thought. That’s a different story though. I bring it up because, in researching vaccines, I learned about “Big Pharma” and the fact that they are the ones funding most of these “studies” that have pro-vaccine findings. How chronic health conditions from our food and drugs lead to people’s further dependence on Big Pharma for more drugs. It’s all for proft. I learned how the billionaires benefit from us being sickly.

And at the same time, as new parents, my husband I began paying more attention to the national grocery recall alerts, in order to stay apprised of what was safe to buy for our kids. Every day, another recall, another contaminated item on the shelves.

Most of it, fresh fruits and vegetables.

Apparently regulating the cleanliness of the farms that grow our food supply is just not that important to the folks in charge… or, could it be that are they doing this on purpose?

Because here’s the other thing about produce. Unless you shell out for organic, which is easily more than twice the price (and can you really trust that little “organic” label, anyway?), so prohibitively expensive for poor people… you’re inevitably ingesting all kinds of toxic pesticides. And you can’t just wash them off, no matter how long you scrub or soak, or with what cleaning materials. (“However much you’re doing,” a former farm employee told my husband, “it’s not enough.”)

I’ve been reading a lot about these pesticides and their effects. Everything from cancer and thyroid disease to early onset of puberty in girls — which is in itself linked to myriad physical and mental health issues.

Early puberty (which I addressed in this post) is a huge problem and it’s getting worse. I read that in the days of early humans, girls didn’t menstruate until like 18-19. More recently in history, it was 14-15. Nowadays, it’s like 11, creeping ever lower.

And it’s because of our food.

Which was so enlightening for me to learn, because as a religious person I always wondered why God would design girls so that they attained physical maturity years before psychological/emotional maturity. I know not to question God’s design, but that seems like a questionable choice.

But then I leaned: He didn’t!! This screwed-up arrangement, which damages our health and our society in a number of ways, is a result of our gross toxic diet.

And even those of us who eat obsessively healthy, shelling out for organic everything, can’t avoid these effects entirely, because these toxins are everywhere. They’re in our environment. They’re in our bodies. Flame retardants in breastmilk. Microplastics in the placenta. It’s true. We’re so cooked, y’all.

And where do we find most of these harmful pesticides, but on fresh produce: the very food that Big Government keeps pushing us to consume more of.

And here’s further evidence that this war is being waged against poor people specifically. WIC, the program that provides food for low-income pregnant women and little kids, provides mostly what kind of foods?: fruits and vegetables. Also, non-organic, low-fat and fat-free dairy — some of the absolute worst food for you, hormonally, full of bovine sex hormones. This is what the government wants you to eat. (The packet WIC gives you specifically reads “Do not buy organic.”) Also, they give you a metric ton of dry cereal, like a boatload of dry cereal, which we all know is highly processed and straight trash for your health, just one big blood sugar spike in a box. Oh, and don’t get me started on the jarred baby foods!

Not saying the government is obligated to give us organic groceries or anything! That would be entitled and absurd, and is not what I believe at all! I’m just pointing out that this is what they are encouraging, in the nutrition counseling that they offer to these poor young families; these are the only kinds of foods that are available to low-income people; WIC is concrete evidence of that.

It’s only rich folks who can afford organic. What are poor folks to do? Growing and raising your own food seems like the only option, if you want to feed your family safely — but who can afford all that land and livestock, not to mention organic feed for said livestock? Answer: only rich people. Poor folks can’t win. There’s no way around it. Literally, it’s be poisoned, or starve. This is probably why poor folks have lower life expectancy.

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So yeah, I no longer think that one person’s claims were so crazy or ridiculous. I don’t think it’s true that “fruits and vegetables are unhealthy,” per se — as a vegetarian who loves vegetables and fruit, I know how good it feels to include a lot of them in one’s diet, and surely they provide a lot of micronutrients! — but in America, for most of us, they are toxic and a major health hazard, because of all the contaminants.

The government knows this perfectly well, and probably has all along, yet they continue to let poorly-regulated, contaminated, toxin-laden produce onto the grocery store shelves — and to pressure us, especially the poorest among us, to buy them.

I’m don’t even identify as a “crunchy mom.” I vaccinate, I take Tylenol, I wear Bath & Body Works, and all of my babies were born in a hospital. But imo it’s become painfully obvious that we, the lower classes, are being poisoned by the big food and drug corporations, and we’re pretty powerless to do anything about it.
The mystery of the curve

July 27th, 2026

Daily writing prompt
What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever?
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All the time, on this stupid little blog, I’m yapping about my terrible taste in music. And it’s true, I like a lot of really bad songs. But guess what! I like some good ones too. One of them is this:

It’s called “Five Colors” by Sam Phillips, in case the above embedded video isn’t working for you.

I know absolutely nothing about Sam Phillips, so if you’re looking to learn about her, sorry, move along. This is actually the only song of hers that I know. According to Google, this album was released in 2001, which makes sense because that’s approximately when I became aware of it, or soon thereafter. I was in middle school (’01-’04), and my parents owned the CD, so I’d hear it sometimes in my mom’s car.

Middle school was around the time my social anxiety/AVPD began to amp up to adult levels. In a way it was even worse, back then, than it is now, because at that age you haven’t developed any defenses yet, and minor things still seem huge, in that childlike way. Yeah, middle school sucked. I don’t remember the first time I heard this song. It was just there, in my house; it seemed like it had been around for a long time. I always found it soothing. I have a distinct memory of listening to it and like intentionally memorizing the words and installing them into my brain prior to this big social event in seventh grade, because hearing it made me physically relax, made me feel like everything was going to be okay. Something about its peaceful sound — but also the lyrics, somehow, although I couldn’t really make much sense of them at that age.

A twelve-year-old’s brain is an impressionable thing, and things inscribed upon it tend to stick there for life. This song has stuck with me for life. And I don’t even listen to it that often — almost never, tbh. It just kind of lives in my brain. (You may have seen me mention it on this blog before.) It pops back up at random times. Specifically, those lingering last two lines:

“I tried, but can’t find refuge in the angle

I’ll walk the mystery of the curve.”

I dunno about you guys, but for me, those lines pretty much sum it up, this whole “life” situation. In my experience, it’s been thirty-six years of repeatedly seeking refuge in the angle, in one way or another, only to eventually have to resign myself to walking the mystery of the curve.

Things are rarely as black-and-white as I’d like for them to be. The senseless, incomprehensible nature of being alive is, to put it lightly, frightening. Angles are comforting. We can explain them. Curves, though, are unknowable. Pi goes on forever. Like, what even is that. How is something as essential as a simple circle so mysterious?

Life is, essentially, crazy. I keep having to accept that.

But isn’t this incompatible with my TradCath POV? Au contraire. Some people like to accuse organized religion of trying to find refuge in the angle — of trying to put God in a nice angular little box. This is only true of those who are doing organized religion wrong.

As I was recently talking about in my post on C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, we humans can’t have a healthy attitude towards God unless we accept how terrifyingly unfathomable are His ways. Our little minds aren’t capable of fathoming Him. Innocent people suffer, and for what? “A loving God would never allow this!” — it seems that way to us, but God is way too big for us to understand.

It isn’t always nice. There isn’t always an upside. I don’t believe that “all things happen for a reason.” Some things are just purely bad, by our own standards. Yet God is good. How can that be?

Things rarely make sense. Accepting our smallness, our powerlessness, the mind-bending horror and brutality of life, the unknowability of God, or of anything important, really — this is a necessary part of being religious. Of being human. This, imo, is what Sam Phillips was getting at.

And so it keeps coming back to me. Still, twenty-five years after first hearing it, this song soothes me. Still, it pops back into my mind at odd times, like a friendly remimder, as life proves its lyrics true again and again and again. I’ll walk the mystery of the curve, it says, while the peaceful, simple melody suggests to me that that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.
In Memory of Clarence

July 12th, 2026

Daily writing prompt
Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?
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One thing about me is, I hate music.

To clarify: music and I, we don’t have a very healthy relationship — not anymore, anyway.

I’m one of the only people I know who doesn’t identify as a “music lover.” Even though I do find some music highly pleasurable, it’s really not something I celebrate, or take pride in, or like to share with others, or personally identify with — it’s not something that I devote a lot of brainpower to. My music listening life is riddled with guilt and shame, a lot of sick pleasure and emotional avoidance. I use music like an illegal drug, not like the wholesome, nourishing meals that it’s meant to be. It’s just bad. As my regular readers know, music, tbh, stresses me out, more than anything else, and I feel like I’d be better off without it.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

For my shitty relationship with music, I myself am mostly to blame, because I am, to put it simply, a terrible person (how could someone who hates music not be a terrible person, right?!). I’d say I’m 95% at fault here. If I were less lazy, if I exerted more effort to be better… but, there’s that remaining five percent: I think there are other, external factors that are also responsible for the rift between music and Mith.

One of these reasons is technological advancement, which hastened the death of my dear friend Clarence.

Ah, Clarence Phineas McLoughlin: a flower too soon faded. A hero fallen. Who, you ask, was Clarence, and what does he have to do with technology or music?! To clarify:

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Another thing about me is, I’m not an Apple person. No iPhones, no iPad, no iAnything. I don’t own any Apple products, not anymore, and actually don’t vibe with their interface at all (although I do have fond memories of those transparent-shelled monitors from the early 2000s; I still remember how exciting it was when my elementary school library replaced their plain old boxy gray computers with the futuristic see-through blue ones that looked like candy! Ah, the thrill of the y2k era. If only we’d had foresight.).

However, there was once one Apple product that was, imo, worth the exorbitant price tag, and which I wish they’d bring back, and that was: the iPod.

Marvelous little thing, the iPod. Technology should have stopped there. “We’ve done it! We’ve completed music listening devices, we’ve completed cell phones. Now let’s move on to curing cancer.”

I was sixteen or seventeen when I got an iPod. (Friggen autocorrect keeps trying to change it to “iPad” — fie upon thee, autocorrect! Have some respect for your elders!) Might have been a seventeenth birthday present, now that I think about it. My family couldn’t afford the regular iPod so I was given an iPod Nano. A little plain white one. I loved him. Being a weirdo, when my iTunes application on the old family desktop computer told me to “name my iPod,” I named him not something obvious like “ipod nano” or “Mith’s iPod,” but rather chose to dignify him with the legal name of Clarence Phineas McLoughlin. Although he always just went by Clarence.

Up until Clarence, I had always listened to CDs, as we all did in those days. CDs were great. I miss CDs. I miss CD stores, I miss hearing a great song on the radio and begging my mom to take me to the CD store ASAP to buy it with my allowance money — that was the only way, back then, to acquire that song! I’m even nostalgic for the anxiety I’d get, worrying about the CD store clerk judging my taste in music, lol! I miss wondering if the rest of the album would be as good as the one or two songs that I’d heard. I miss the little pop-click of loading a CD into my walkman, and the inky smell of the fresh CD jacket. I’d sit there with the new disc playing in my headphones, checking out the jacket art (look at what the artist made for me!) (back before social media, when musicians and celebrities were like otherworldly figures, cloaked in mystery and intrigue!) and reading the lyrics and making note of which track numbers I liked and which ones I’d be skipping. But then sometimes you just let the thing play, and the weaker tracks start to grow on you, and you start to appreciate the album for a whole complete work, like a symphony.

With Clarence, that started to change, but I still enjoyed albums because it was still pretty convenient. I loaded all my old CDs onto Clarence, bought some albums on iTunes, listened to whole albums on Clarence — but also began to get more scattered about it, now that I could make my own playlists and employ the “Shuffle” function. Things were beginning to fall apart, I admit — but if we had stopped there, things might have been better. That was the last time I had a good relationship with music. Through Clarence.

The iPod was a happy medium between CDs and the modern world of Spotify and smartphones. It was still pro-artist, pro-album, pro-art. You hear a song you like on the radio, you log onto the Internet on your family PC and go check out the album on iTunes, listening to the thirty-second clips of each track, and if it’s good, you buy it for $9.99 (with digital jacket art that Clarence showed on his little screen as the song played!), and upload it to your iPod — the new CD shopping, minus the social anxiety. Pretty much perfect.

I miss albums.

I know some people, the music lovers out there, still go out of their way to purchase entire albums. Not I. It’s no longer necessary. It’s too inconvenient anymore. Now, I hear a song I like on the radio, I just add it to a YouTube playlist, and that’s that. I don’t have patience or energy to deep-dive into entire artists anymore.

It used to be that, because I had to pay $10-20 for a CD, I’d only buy music that I actually respected and believed to be worth my money, of which I’ve never had much. I never bought any hip-hop or rap CDs (unless you count Linkin Park/Jay-Z’s Collision Course, which was like my gateway drug).

YouTube is free — with ads.

So, I pretty much exclusively listen to assorted little bits of mainstream junk, now, mostly hip-hop. With ads.

By the time Clarence died, the age of the smartphone was upon us, the ephemeral age of the iPod already in the past. In a way, my love of music died along with Clarence.

I fully admit that I am to blame here. The advancement of technology only rots your brain if you were a weak-minded person to begin with. Brilliant people still exist today, and use technology as a tool rather than letting it use them. I’m not one of those people. I’m just another complicit zombie loser (why did autocorrect try to change that to “lover”?! Ffs! See?! Smartphones suck!) who’s allowed a piece of her soul to be eaten by the merciless mercenary advancement of technology. Or maybe I’m just feeling glum about all this because my husband and I recently watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. (Go watch it, if you haven’t yet!)

CDs are pretty much incompatible with life in 21st century America, but, imho, there’s still a place for the iPod — especially as more and more of us are trying to reduce our phone usage, but don’t quite know how to live without some degree of modern technology because that’s just how our world is built anymore.

And yes, yes, I’m aware that you can still buy pre-owned iPods, on ebay and such. Artifacts. That’s not what the world needs. That’s not what my soul misses. It’s not even Clarence himself that I miss, so much as the age that he was defined by. The iPod age — the pre-smartphone age. Sure, I could purchase a pre-owned iPod off ebay, but that would not turn back the clock. I don’t have the power to do that. Money is power, and of that I’ve never had much.

But we know who does. The big corporations. They own us. They run this place. They can do anything. Apple, if they wanted to, could virtually turn back the clock for us. They could usher back in the iPod era. They could make the sun rise once again on the Age of Clarence!

So please, Apple — this one little pawn is begging you!: bring back the iPod era! Give Clarence back his rightful place on the throne. Give me back my appreciation for musicians and their craft. Give me back my love of music. Give me back that piece of my soul. I’ll buy it back from you. I’ll give you my money, I promise.
The only thing I know about “success in life”

June 14th, 2026

Daily writing prompt
What’s your top tip to be successful in life?
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“Successful in life” — wow, I’m flattered — who do you think I am, WordPress Daily Prompts? Do I look like Elon Musk, or Saint Carlo Acutis, or Kardea Brown (my hero!), or, I dunno, Barack Obama, or any other modern-day example of what anyone’s definition of “success in life” might possibly look like? Me? I’m literally just some wannabe writer blogging on WordPress on my phone while nursing my baby in a recliner.

Although I’m a pretty happy person — happier, I daresay, than many of my peers — I can’t claim to know much about any kind of “success in life,” as I’m not super great at any particular thing, and am very far from holy, wealthy, good, or “high-achieving” by any definition of that term.

I guess if there’s one area of life in which I can maybe say a thing or two about “success,” it is: recovery, as in: recovery from alcoholism and EDs.

First of all, before I share with you what I believe to be “the secret to success” in recovery, I’ll tell you my credentials: the reasons why you should, well, I won’t say “believe” or “trust” my advice, because my advice might not even work for you; different things work for different people, in recovery, contrary to what some folks in Recoveryland like to loudly assert; just in order that you might see that I have a legitimate reason to say anything on the topic at all. Or at least to believe that I may.

My credentials: completely sober from alcohol since March 2019 without the aid of any particular program or rehab or methodology; was in A.A. for four years before that (since January of 2015), but with only spotty bouts of sobriety there. Prior to that, I drank addictively, or at least problematically, since 2007/08. So, that’s approximately twelve years of active addiction, and seven years sober.

And also: virtually fully “recovered” from anorexia & bulimia since the same time, March 2019 (not counting a period of relapse in late 2021), also without the aid of therapy or inpatient treatment or any particular technique.

Prior to that, I lived with some iteration of an eating disorder since 2004, when I was fourteen and first diagnosed with anorexia. In roughly 2011, when I started drinking more heavily, the anorexia evolved into bulimia (alcohol will do that to ya!). I’ll spare you all the gory details. Long story short, the entirety of my teens and twenties were one long and depressing battle, and during this time I pretty much never got periods, because of being constantly in starvation mode, so I was pretty sure I’d never have kids naturally.

But since approximately 2019 (unlike sobriety, it’s harder to pinpoint the exact date of recovery from EDs, because it’s less black-and-white), I’ve been at a pretty stable and normal size. I’ve managed to attain, and even accept, my “normal” weight — i.e., the weight that I am at when I’m living a happy life and not thinking about food constantly. Feeling safe around food, and tbh even bored by it. And! Best of all, I’ve had four kids, naturally, without the aid of any kind of reproductive technology.

So, that’s fifteen-seventeen years of living with an active ED, approximately five-seven years “recovered.”

So that’s the abridged version of my little story. It’s pretty undramatic, I guess — no hospitalizations or brushes with death or whatever — certainly they won’t be making any movies about me, lol. But still, I think it’s evident that I’ve achieved what could be called “success,” in this area.

How? What is the secret?

“The secret to success,” in my opinion at least, is this: and I wish someone had told it to me this plainly at the outset of my recovery: the secret is getting used to being uncomfortable.

You’re not going to feel magically different. You’re never going to be able to eat unself-consciously, without worry, like you did when you were a kid. Let go of that dream. You’re never going to feel great about yourself; socializing will always be hard; you will never like the way you look. Yes, you could say some things about your life are “ruined” or “broken” — you just have a new normal now. You will get used to it — and life will be good anyway!

I wish it had been put to me so plainly — I wasted so much time and energy chasing after this mirage of “learning to love myself,” “finding myself,” “overcoming,” “gaining freedom,” being “happy,” etc. etc. etc., all of it useless lies.

But I guess those ideas are what sell. You’re not going to inspire someone to quit drinking or quit starving themselves if you tell them “it’s true, you’ll never feel good in your own skin, you’re always going to be uncomfortable! You’ll never have a “normal” relationship with food, and you’ll never like the way you look! You just get used to it!” If that’s how you try to sell recovery, sick people will just shake their head and say “I’ll pass” and keep right on choosing sickness — I know I would have!

Maybe that’s why it was never told to me plainly. I guess you have to rosy it up a bit, to inspire people to want to get better. “Learn the art of intuitive eating!” “Practice affirmations of self-love!” “You’ll experience a total personality change as a result of working the Twelve Steps!” Lies! All lies! None of that ever happened, for me, no matter how desperately I wanted them or how hard I worked to engineer them. — But guess what! Life is good anyway!

“You just get used to being uncomfortable,” a fellow alcoholic said to me in A.A. once, and that might have been the single most useful thing anyone ever said to me in my four years in the program, more useful than anything in the actual literature. It’s so true. It’s so unglamorous. There’s no Lisa Frank-looking utopia at the end of the dark tunnel. The dark tunnel is what it is. This is it, you’re already there. Your eyes just adapt to the darkness. And pretty soon you find it’s alright. You have a good life there. You actually have evolved — just not in the fairytale way that you’d hoped to.

Don’t give up! The discomfort gets less agonizing as you adapt. It becomes like the snores of an annoying roommate rather than the shrieks of some homicidal stranger who’s broken into your house, threatening you. Things even out. Things become undramatic. Things that used to bowl you over just make you chuckle and shrug your shoulders now.

My legs are massive — yeah, I hate them, I never want to wear shorts. So what. I’m 36. I literally have better things to worry about now. My life is good and I am happy even though I hate my legs and refuse to go out in shorts.

I don’t like to eat in social situations. So what. They’ll tell you you aren’t really enjoying life unless you can cut loose and eat a spontaneous indulgent lunch with your friends at a restaurant, and order dessert — that is blatantly false. I don’t do that kind of thing, but I love my life and am happy. Accepting my limitations and adapting to them — that was the secret to success.

I have intense social anxiety and can’t make friends — still true. So I just… don’t go out or make friends. So what. Life is still good. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. I find other ways to scratch the social itch (hello, reader!). Am I lonely sometimes? In a way, sure, but it’s not world-ending. Life comes with little pains and sadnesses. It doesn’t mean it’s not a good life.

You get used to being uncomfortable. That’s the big secret. In a way, it’s actually a relief to know that. You don’t have to stress about attaining some mythical RECOVERED status. You don’t have to worry that you’re not recovered enough because you’re not happy enough, those layers of worry folding over and over on each other like puff pastry dough. When you accept that this is simply it, this is all there is, this darkness in the tunnel, then you can just… be, and accept that you are already doing it, you’re already there. You can start to get your footing there.

Now keep in mind I’m just one person and what works for me might not work for you. Or maybe you have actually attained some mythical Lisa Frank place of freedom and joy, in which case, wow! Congrats! I’m happy for you. But recovery is also available to those of us who for whatever reason can’t get there. Life is still good. You just have to really accept that it’s not going to be perfect. It’s actually so much better when you take it for what it is. Things are good now. I wish someone would have told me plainly.

Or maybe they tried. Maybe this is one that you really just have to figure out for yourself and put into your own words when you do.
What is truth?

May 14th, 2026

Daily writing prompt
What’s a word or phrase that annoys you?
View all responses

Disclaimer: if you’re someone who uses this phrase regularly, I have nothing against you. Seriously: my favorite person in the world, my beloved husband, uses this phrase regularly. Most people don’t really think about it when they say it, and that’s fine! It’s just become a normal part of the English language nowadays, unfortunately. So please don’t take this post as an attack. I’m just taking a moment to wallow in my irritabiliy and give my inner “armchair critic” a moment to sound off, because it’s fun and cathartic, and what else is this stupid little personal blog for if not a bit of fun and catharsis and sounding off.

A word or phrase that annoys me: “my truth.” As in, “speak your truth,” or “I’m telling my truth.”

In addition to simply sounding, imo, annoying, snivelly and whiny, à la “safe space” or “love yourself” or “holding space for…” or any of those saccharine pop-psychology catchphrases that turn my stomach — it’s also philosophically disastrous.

There is no such thing as “my truth”! There is only the truth.

What I have is: a perspective, an opinion, a point of view, a version of events, a personal understanding of what things are and how they happen… but that is not the same as truth.

I get it. It’s just a saying. “My truth” is just a cute, concise, and heartfelt way of expressing all of what I just listed in the above paragraph. However, I still take issue with the phrase, because I think it betrays a flawed understanding of reality.

We say more about ourselves than we mean to. Often, the way we use language conveys things about us that we don’t even realize; there’s more meaning in our speech than just what we’re trying to convey literally with our words. When we use phrases like “my truth,” it exposes a basic belief (or at least a tolerance, a passive acceptance of the belief, which essentially amounts to belief) that truth is subjective. That there is no objective truth.

Which is of course false, and hugely problematic. I suspect that the rise of the phrase “my truth” is just another symptom of (here we go again, with Mith diagnosing grave societal ills while sitting in a recliner nursing her baby, but) this grave societal ill of “me first”-ism. “Self-love” gone haywire.

Our culture these days is so secular, and so self-centered. “Just be a good person” and “just accept everyone and let them do what they want (unless they are Christian)” seem to be the religious tenets that we live by. Celebration of the self and its carnal appetites is a heroic virtue, to us. There is no objective truth — truth is just what any individual wants it to be, and no one has any right to tell them otherwise! To believe in objective truth is offensive. It’s a violation of others’ individual freedoms. “Freedom,” not being subject to any law but ourselves — that’s what we’re all about.

Which is so far from a healthy and sane understanding of reality and our role in it. The truth exists independently of us, and we ought to serve it and be subject to it. We need to acknowledge that our faculties are limited, that we are small and dumb, that our little POV is not the be-all/end-all — far from it. Something greater than us exists, and that’s the truth… but some of us aren’t ready to hear that.

There is no “my truth.” There is only the truth. Saying “my truth” just makes you sound juvenile and flaccid of heart.

Ahem, alright, I’ll hop off my silly little soapbox now. I’ll just leave you guys with this quote from Scripture:

John 18:37-38: ” ‘For this was I born, and for this came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth.’ … Pilate saith to him: ‘What is truth?’ And when he said this, he went out again to the Jews, and saith to them: ‘I find no cause in him.’ “
To vote or not to vote

April 24th, 2026

Daily writing prompt
Do you vote in political elections?
View all responses

Ah, voting. I once “dated” this stoner guy who refused to vote, because all politicians are evil and corrupt anyway, so what’s the point; why participate, why support the broken system, he said. And he was right; they are evil and the system is broken.

But, I figured we need to vote anyway, because, well, what else can we do, right? It’s a free, quick, and easy thing we can do that might possibly have an effect. (Tbh I think dude was just lazy.)

That stoner guy situation was eleven years ago. Since then, I’ve cleaned up and amended my life, and converted to Traditional Catholicism. Thus, I’ve begun to consider another, more compelling reason why maybe I shouldn’t vote.

I’m no political philosopher, but I kinda think democracy… ain’t really it. In public school, they love to drill it into our brains that DEMOCRACY 🇺🇸 and FREEDOM 🦅 are the best things ever and we ought to be grateful for our power to choose. But, is that really so good?

Politics are complicated, and hard to understand, and the average working citizen just doesn’t have the time or the means to know what’s really going on and what needs to be done about it. Also, a great many people are highly unintelligent. I don’t want poorly-informed, unintelligent people making these important decisions about my children’s future. In short, I don’t really think We The People should be the ones to govern ourselves.

Monarchy gets a really bad rap these days — “No Kings” and all — but, in theory, I really think monarchy is the way to go. The catch, however, is that the monarch would have to be good: he’d have to be the selfless and enlightened Philosopher King of Plato’s Republic. (And as a Catholic, I obviously think the monarch should answer to the Holy See and operate in union with it.) Good luck finding one of those, in D.C. in 2026.

Unfortunately, because our government is a mess, we have to work with what we’ve got. It’s no use just standing there digging our heels in and going “the government sucks! We need a new one!” because that’s not going to happen. The only thing we can do, in this situation, is vote.

And yeah, as a normal citizen I’m not equipped to fully understand what’s going on and what to do about it. Why then do I still vote?

I’m 36. I’ve been voting for half my life, and the way that I vote has changed so many times over these eighteen years. I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out the best, most ethical way to do this. Our two-party system is a joke; like any sane human, I don’t fully agree with either party. I strongly support some things the Republicans propose, and strongly support some things the Democrats propose. What, then, to do?! After much prayerful consideration, I’ve decided that the best thing, the only thing I can do, really, is choose one issue that’s the most important to me, and vote on that.

“But by voting on a single issue, you’re indirectly feeding the evil machine by voting corrupt villains into power!” You know, maybe that’s true. Maybe I should try to find other ways to affect change in the areas that I think need changing. But as a busy mom on a tight budget, my options are severely limited. I don’t have the money to donate to causes, nor the time to go to rallies or protests. Voting is, like I said, free, quick, and easy.

“Then you should vote third party so as to not support the bad guys” — also a valid criticism, and worth considering. I have voted third party in the past, even written in candidates from hopelessly small parties, thinking to myself: “I should be the change I wish to see in the world! If everyone who wants to vote third party but is afraid to waste their vote would just get together and agree to actually do it, then the third parties might not be so hopelessly small! They might stand a chance!”

But after much prayerful consideration, I’ve decided that voting is an area where I need to be practical, not idealistic. Voting for a third party, especially a tiny one — you may as well not vote, and that’s a sad fact. If I throw away a vote that I could have used to make an actual difference in the area that matters to me, then I’ve done something bad. I could have made a positive difference and chose not to.

So, I grit my teeth and vote for what I see as the lesser of two evils.

My husband (who, in socionics, is an IEE Ethicist, whereas I’m an ILI Logician) has a different take. He leans strongly in one direction, when it comes to the two parties; but to him, a candidate’s personal integrity matters just as much as, if not more than, their stance on the issues. I dunno about that. For a long time, I figured I could stand to vote for an unsavory individual who does icky things behind closed doors, as long as the changes that that individual’s election would bring about were good, especially in the issue that matters most to me.

However, if that invidual being in office is causing death and destruction in other areas… and if they’re actually more evil than we previously thought… at what point does that outweigh the slight good that might be brought about in the one area? I don’t know. After half my life, I’m still conflicted.

So yeah, obviously I vote, in every election. Whether we should have the power to vote is questionable, but as long as we have the power to vote, I think we ought to. To vote or not to vote is a very simple question, imo. The more interesting question is how to vote, in 2026 America. And I don’t know if I’ll ever figure it out.
“What is one word that describes you?”

March 19th, 2026

Daily writing prompt
What is one word that describes you?
View all responses

Depends… who’s asking?

I actually have personal beef with this question; I hate it, and it will never not make me cringe. Because (story time!) way back in tenth grade, my World History teacher made us answer this question for some accursed “getting to know each other” game on the first day of class (an introvert’s nightmare). And, trying to make sure everyone knew that I was edgy and dangerous and troubled and mysterious, do you know what my dumb ass wrote down for an answer?

“Problematic.” 🤦‍♀️

Not entirely untrue, lol, but, come on. As you can imagine, people just kind of frowned and scratched their heads and gave me a wide berth. Best believe that incident set the tone for my sophomore year of high school. Ugh, the cringe is painful.

But whatever. Honestly, that whole class was lame anyway. I’m pretty sure that the teacher, a very charming and youthful twentysomething ESE (my conflictor type, me being an ILI) was just there because he wanted to party with the cool and popular high schoolers; so, he wasn’t a big fan of mine. My only fond memory of that class was when my BFF and I collaborated on a presentation about the emporer Nero, recording a sock-puppet show full of our goofy ironic humor and random gags that left the whole class (and teacher) once again frowning and scratching their heads like wtf is wrong with those two, while we sat there crying with laughter. See, this time it was funny, because someone else was being weird with me.

But, I digress.

One word that describes me, now that I’m 36… it depends who’s asking. If you’re someone that I don’t know too well and want to stay on safe/neutral grounds with, I’d probably just smile and mumble some sheepish, guarded response like: “introspective,” “overthinking,” “boring,” or something like that — all of which are true of me but don’t really get to the heart of the truth.

But since it’s WordPress’s Daily Prompt that’s asking, and since this blog is my little space to be really honest with you, since I don’t know who you are — you could be anyone — and since probably no one will read this anyway, so what does it matter; I’ll try to give an answer that gets to the heart of the truth.

My best answer today: conflicted.

I feel like “conflicted” sums it up, what I essentially am and what it’s like to be me. And basically sums up what this blog is about. It’s the but in between two clauses, creating the tension that I live in. Like: I’m a homeschooling Traditional Catholic SAHM who wants to fit in with the other TradCath mommies, who are all so feminine and classy and well-mannered, but I’m also a tomboy with AVPD and a weird sense of humor and a fine arts degree. I’m married and love being a wife but, also, ain’t no freakin’ wifey. I want to be a writer, but my ideas are shit and I’m pretty sure no one will like them and am too afraid to try and find out. I am proud of my body for having four perfect children, but I also hate it because it’s a hideous meat-tank and I wish I could trade it in for a different model. I’m all for body positivity and fat women being free to be themselves, but I also believe the body positivity movement is sick and wrong and needs to be undone. I’m a closeted alt kid who loves blue hair and weird fashion but I also believe that modesty and conformity to societal norms are important, and I ain’t no woke liberal. I want to love and serve God but I’m still so entrenched in sin. I’m vegetarian/vegan but I also understand carnivores and why they do what they do. I love hip-hop & rap but I also believe that popular hip-hop culture is unhealthy and steeped in sin and we shouldn’t listen to it. I’m a conservative, but I kinda relate more to liberals most of the time. I’m this but I’m also that, and it creates conflict.

I can see things from both sides. Which way to be? Which side to lean towards, or, how to find a happy medium? About most things (not all things; the few things that I’m sure of, like Catholicism, provide an anchor, without which I’d surely just float off into the ether and never return), I’m conflicted.

And that’s why this blog exists, really. If any of this resonates with you, we should be friends. Like I was saying, it’s so much more fun being weird with someone else.