Long-term alcohol abuse makes it impossible for people to have healthy intimate relationships. — “Wow. I would bet anything that if you put his brain under a scanner, there would be noticeable signs of damage in his prefrontal cortex.” This was the first thing my therapist said after listening to me explain my ex’s drinking habits for the 10 years we were together, as…

No winners, no losers. — You never start out thinking you’ll end up like this. It seems unfathomable, unrealistic even, that someone woven so deeply and thoroughly into the fabric of your existence could ever remove themselves without unwinding it all in one fell swoop. And then, suddenly, you realize that the feeling of rocketing…

Nature taught me it’s nothing personal. — It feels like Death has been taunting me, hovering over my shoulder with scythe in disembodied hand, laughing in my ear with each reminder, “You can never escape me…” There have been too many friends in the past few years, taken tragically too soon — some whose stories were quietly…

A poem — Letting go of your dreams is hard work. They say expectations can only end in disappointment. To expect is to predict, and none of us are truly fortune tellers. Anything can happen, really. But when we dream, we dare to have the audacity to tell our own fortunes and expect them…

Bad news, boys — science points to the latter when it comes to your struggles on dating apps. — I’ve noticed a trend in recent years that’s only getting louder and louder in the social media sphere — self-proclaimed good guys lamenting the devastating and unfair impact that the plethora of options women receive on dating apps has on men’s chances at finding love. They think women are becoming…

The breaths that carry pain are the same breaths that make room for joy. — Most days now, I feel like I can finally breathe for the first time in years. But there is still the occasional assault of grief or rage during which I feel like I’m drowning under the endless weight of it all, like maybe I’ll never be able to truly come…

I should have never let you plunge your novice hands into my depths. — Before you reduced me to this sticky, dense, messy version of myself, I was delicate sugar — raw, featherlight, crystalline in composition, glistening, and free-flowing. You fell in love with the way you could run your fingers through a sea of minuscule rocks so tiny that you felt nothing but…

I hate the part of me that still does. — I loved the idea of both of us, wrinkly-skinned and hunched, standing two feet apart from each other cackling with laughter as we repeat the ritual back-and-forth bantering of “HUH?!” for the 894,765th time. I still love the idea of it, no matter how much I wish I didn’t. All…

Fight the urge to sink — I don’t know when exactly it was that my worldview shifted from optimism to cynicism. It was like I fell asleep with my toes in the water and woke up out to sea. Now I don’t know where the shore is. Everything is just…blue. Most times I feel like it…