Chelsea Fagan

It’s like the social media version of meth. You know that the disdainful spite-scrolling is only raising your blood pressure, grinding your teeth down, and generally making you an overall worse person.

Yes, Baby Spice was reminding all of our suitors — no matter how overcome with the urgent passion of lovemaking — to wrap that weenie up.

Unfortunately, for those who clearly went to the Compliment Into The Cooter School of Sexual Prowess, we are not items on a Chuck E Cheese prize shelf which can be handed off with the right amount of flattery tickets.

We know that if we eat whole, clean, nutritionally dense foods, we will feel better.

Sweaters are often collateral damage of relationships.

One day, that voicemail from that relative becomes a memorial, something you listen to over and over again because you were too stupid to call them back when you had the chance.

They always love us, even when we don’t deserve it. Their hearts know no limit to the amount of attention or affection someone should get, and they are made almost entirely of joy and anticipation.

There are people who spend years traveling around, uprooting themselves any time they feel their heels digging into the dirt, looking for a fresh start to appease the sense of itchy restlessness that accompanies a stagnant zip code.

Not specifying to the waiter that you just want regular tap water and then having to pay for this absurd bottle of precious mineral water harvested from the morning dew in Ryan Gosling’s private wildflower garden.

I remember telling her, “This is so unhealthy. You don’t see it, but he’s changing you completely.” I’m sure my attempts, like everyone else’s, at getting something across to her were imperfect and oversimplified and not what she really needed to hear, but we weren’t professionals.

I wonder about all of the things she did not do because she was waiting for someone to answer to, waiting for something to make it all worth it. She told me about one party; there must have been hundreds of others.

All of the new products and ideas for getting young girls interested in the STEM fields and out of restrictive gender norms, such as Roominate.

When you hear the word hissed across a bar as another girl parades by in a red dress and full confidence, it is not really this woman that the speaker hates. It is herself.

You essentially take a long walk off a short pier of respectful, timely communication and sequester yourself into a love-cave to grow a sex-beard à la Rip Van Winkle.

Becoming more acutely aware of how precious all the time you have with your older family members is, and how not a single day with them is guaranteed.

Because this kind of chivalry — doing everything possible to make a woman feel safe and acknowledged — is not based on what it means to be a woman. It is acknowledging that she encounters, likely on a daily basis, many men who disrespect her humanity.

But sometimes the silence is overwhelming. You prop your laptop against a neighboring pillow and it takes up the space that someone else might — a space that might even be empty, if you could stand it.

We are an amalgam of our best selfies, of the edits, and of the tagged photos we approved. We are someone else entirely, someone more conventionally beautiful.