Confessions of a crazy girl: On mental health, overcoming stigma and cultivating greater compassion

"How did you like the movie?" my friend asked, noticing I was trailing behind everyone else on our way out of the theater. We'd gone, just a few friends, to see "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." I didn't have to think about my answer. It had been pounding in my head for three-fourths of the movie and for days beforehand, finally unlocked by the melancholy teenage wonder on the screen. 

"It made me sad, like I don't deserve friends and need to lock myself in a dark room and listen to The Smiths all alone," I said. Go figure that a movie based on a book that is generally lauded to perfectly encapsulate the misfit adolescent experience would leave me, at 26, babbling like a sad and moody teen. But that's just the thing—some parts of being a sad and moody teen aren't so easily left behind. The anxiety and depression that made my teenage years so difficult weren't confined to adolescence. They followed me into adulthood, into quite a few dark nights and eventually into a therapist's office.

--"Confessions of a crazy girl: On mental health, overcoming stigma and cultivating greater compassion"

Mental health and compassion were important several months ago when I wrote this column, and even more pertinent post Sandy Hook and the current conversation on mental health, guns, and more.

A young liberal lady's perspective on pre-election fears, compassion and being friends with Republicans

So here are my 2 cents as a 20-something lady, on what I'm scared of and why I'm voting for Obama. I'm scared because I live in a town where, as I've written about before, I can't walk down the street without men commenting on my body and what they'd like to do to it. I live in a town where a woman going out for a jog so that she can be fit and healthy and probably feel a little better about herself and have something in her day she can be proud of was brutally raped in broad daylight by two thugs. It's bad enough that these things happen, but it could get even worse. After all, we are staring down the barrel of a right-wing agenda that can't stop splitting hairs about what kinds of rape are more or less rape-y than others, a right-wing agenda that is trying to pass legislation that favors rapists, both in their ability to be prosecuted and in their ability to demand visitation rights for children that rape victims would be unable to abort if Romney and his ilk had their way.

--"A young liberal lady's perspective on pre-election fears, compassion and being friends with Republicans"

I'm really, really glad Obama won.

Women walking: A lady's perspective on street harassment

"I want to lick you up and down."

I turned around. A tall, lanky man on a bicycle had silently ridden up behind me. I said nothing. I kept walking, looking straight ahead. I wanted to yell at him and tell him to stick it where the sun doesn't shine. But I didn't. I was nervous and too busy planning what I could do to get out of a suddenly sticky situation. I'm also a people-pleasing, socially anxious Southern girl who was too scared to be rude, even if someone else was rude first.

Instead, I just kept walking. He kept biking beside me. He started asking me questions, the innocuous, small talk kind. If I yelled at him or told him to stop, I knew he'd pretend that he was just trying to be friends and want to know why I was being so unfriendly. If I kept answering his questions, he'd keep following me and harassing me and get more and more of a sense of entitlement about making good on his offer. There didn't seem to be good conversational options for diffusing a situation that was rapidly getting stickier and stickier.

--"Women walking: A lady's perspective on street harassment"

This was written after both a brutal rape in Chattanooga and a really scary harassment incident I personally experienced. It seems especially worth revisiting after the news of the brutal gang rape in Deli has been rocking the news. Rape is never ok. Harassment is never ok. Men, stop being dicks, and women, it's time to stop feeling the onus is solely on us to simply be sacred. 

MES Quicklist: 5 Baller Christmas Movies That Are So Weird and NonTraditional They Might Not Even Be Christmas Movies

I don’t know about you but I’m the kind of grumpy adult who has really conflicted feelings about Christmas. Sometimes I love it, like when I put up my Christmas tree, but even then it’s really twisted because my Christmas tree is like a My Little Pony drag show on steroids.   Mostly I don’t like Christmas, especially the parts that involve people being trampled at WalMart on Black Friday. So when it comes to getting in the Christmas Spirit, it means less actual Christmas, and more weird awesome personalized Christmas traditions. Rudolph and Santa Claus is Coming To Town just don’t cut it. Here are my Top 5 picks for replacements:

--MES Quicklist: 5 Baller Christmas Movies That Are So Weird and NonTraditional They Might Not Even Be Christmas Movies

Why this lady doesn't want to "have it all"

The more I hear about how I can "have it all," the more it really starts to sound like "doing it all." I fail to see how this conceptual obsession benefits the majority of women. After all, trying to go general in an increasingly specialized world creates impossible pressure in an already-challenging situation. I mean, combining both a career and homemaking was hard enough in decades past, before liberal arts degrees were branded as "useless" and when people still repaired their own cars. Does anyone else remember that episode of "The Wonder Years" where Mrs. Arnold gets a job and starts serving her baffled family a bunch of frozen dinners? Or the running theme from the entire run of "Roseanne" about the strange and terrible casseroles she'd feed the kids after working all day at a minimum-wage job and shopping on a budget? 

--"Why this lady doesn't want to "have it all"

I was really pleased by the response this column got. Apparently a lot of women relate to the intensity of the pressure we feel to be perfect on all fronts-- jill of all trades and masters of all. Unfair!

Coming to terms with being socially homeless

I responded to my friend's post, "As someone who has never felt like I fit in or have a scene to call my own, I really feel this. I'm not snarky or cynical enough to be a hipster, nor am I OCD enough to pull off the obsessively curated decor/fashion/food/records/comics/bicycles/beekeeping equipment/[insert hip obsession here]. I didn't fit in with the hippies during my brief hippie phase because hippie culture here translated through southern Appalachia just became this weird redneck Peter Pan syndrome thing: all of the downsides of hippie culture with none of the West Coast benefits. I never knew any real goths who weren't just mall-shopping kids who watched 'The Crow' a lot or ravers who weren't just Polish exchange students with a binge-drinking problem and an insanely mainstream/mediocre dance music collection. Between the part of the world I live in and the fact that most scenes seem a little *too*, I've been somewhat uncomfortably culturally homeless for my entire adulthood. But I sure have Goldilocks'ed a lot of scenes, tasting each one in hopes of finding one that's juuuuuuuust right."

--"Coming to terms with being socially homeless"

Being a scene straddler can be tough, whether it's because of broad interests or living in a small town. Here's some perspective.

Generation Grateful Clash, Generation Catalano and growing up in between

All my life I've felt like, in the immortal words of The Eels, "my timing is off." I was early to the game on '90s nostalgia when I went to middle school dressed for all the world like Angela Chase on "My So-Called Life," when I didn't know it was cool to love '80s New Wave until I picked up an Interpol album in high school, and again when I showed up to a Moonlight Bride concert at JJ's Bohemia. When I discovered Modest Mouse and Bright Eyes and Ben Folds Five and Built to Spill and all those other indie bands in high school, I didn't think they were for me. I wasn't part of the community that formed around loving these albums. I thought of all that indie rock as a package delivered to the wrong address, originally intended for the hipster circle I was always on the fringes of.

--"Generation Grateful Clash, Generation Catalano and growing up in between"

So many people, myself included, talk about Gen X, Gen Y, Baby Boomers, and more like they are discreet, distinct groups. Yet people and life are messy, and generations are made up of people and span lives. They aren't as strongly defined as we like to believe, or in a way that always makes it easy for writers to discuss. I myself don't fit into Gen Y perfectly-- I have a lot more in common with Gen X pop culturally than my Green Day-listening younger cousins who are more firmly planted in Gen Y's span. This column for Nooga.com is about the people who fall between different generations, and its affect on taste and fitting in.