When my fellow highly-sensitive, gentle friend posts on Facebook asking how we are all doing, I barely hesitate. Not well, I reply, my mind and body are having trouble adjusting to the new frequency of things. This is my truth, which I struggle to articulate.

10 months in, my feet are unsteady underneath me, and much of the time I just feel like I have no control over my emotional-physical well-being. …

When people ask me who practices polyamory, my answer is that all kinds of people do; in fact, they probably already know someone who’s polyamorous! I feel lucky that I had the privilege and security to be open with my relationship orientation pretty early on when I figured it out. I’d just come out of a marriage, was single, didn’t have a job that would be put in jeopardy or family who would turn their backs.

Coming out as polyamorous was important to me for many reasons.

I made a post on my Facebook page, and to my surprised delight, received multiple private messages from friends I’d had no idea were on the non-monogamy side of the relationship spectrum. As a writer with strong convictions, I’ve chosen to use my voice to talk about things many people won’t (or can’t) talk about. It’s one of the reasons I write about polyamory, and a big reason for the creation of Polyamory Today. …

A couple of weeks ago, there was a big to-do because Lizzo decided to do a juice cleanse. I’m not going to get into all the details (they’re easy to find with a quick search), but I will say that it was emotionally exhausting to watch it unfold.

Seeing the diet-culture, intentional-weight-loss focused propaganda on the page of the personal trainer/nutritionist/whatever that Lizzo was working with was hard. What was harder was knowing it was just the beginning of the New Years January onslaught of diet culture posts. For your fat friends, it’s triggering, frustrating, disappointing, and exhausting. …

Here we are again, at the beginning of the season of sweets. Last week at work, we finally received the first of what will be several much-anticipated boxes of chocolate sent by our consultants and vendors. Along with the boxes always come self-deprecating comments by co-workers as they dig in, searching for their favorites.

I really shouldn’t.

Ugh, more chocolates? What are they doing to us!

There goes all my hard work.

I sit at my desk and listen, and begin building the wall I have to put up around myself every December. I am experiencing the first twinges of the letdown of what feels like endless talk about diets and weight loss. Even when it’s framed as being about health, it’s all just a whole lot of buy-in to a really harmful diet culture. …

I attended an HR training last year where the instructor gave us statistics about how employment lawsuits and complaints are at an all-time high. Is this because employers are treating their workers more poorly? Nope. It’s because the up and coming generations have two things: the knowledge that they have rights, and the resources to research and find the actual labor laws that support those rights.

There are more lawsuits in the workplace, and it isn’t because the younger generation is touchy. It’s because people in the workforce are paying closer attention to the laws that have always been there. …

About 14 miles north of Bellingham, where I live, lies the town of Lynden, Washington. With a population between 15–20,000, and so many churches that people there used to claim it had the world record for most churches per square mile, Lynden has oft been compared to the town in Footloose. On Saturday, they had a holiday kickoff in the midst of rising COVID infection rates.

The event included dozens of mask-less people mingling and a 20-person choir, singing shoulder-to-shoulder, nary a mask in the bunch. Meanwhile, my friend got the news that her cousin is in the ICU on a ventilator and my Mom told me that a relative younger than I am was found bleeding from his nose and mouth after a COVID-induced stroke. These are young people, with families. If they recover, they will likely face lifelong challenges. …

Full disclosure: it wasn’t that long ago that the thought of referring to a romantic partner as Daddy really squicked me out. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to associate such a familial word with anything sexy or erotic. I was judgmental, and very sure that I would never!

Of all the surprising things I’ve discovered while exploring my sexuality, my love for Daddy/girl power exchange is one of the least expected. It’s also one of the things I’ve talked about the least. Sure, I’ve talked about having a Dominant/submissive (D/s) dynamic. But delving further into the specifics is trickier. …

I recently enjoyed a several-weeks long stint as a moderator in a Facebook group with about 2,500 writers. Yesterday, I sent the original moderator a message explaining that I wasn’t willing to run a group with her.

It came down a fundamental difference in opinions about how a group should be run. You see, she believed that the group was for writing, so it wasn’t necessary or appropriate to talk about/place focus on “politics” sometimes. …