This past week, I came across Luke O’Neil’s reflections on his struggle with exercise bulimia in Esquire. The article made me grateful that more is being written about (a) exercise bulimia (I linked to a CNN article in which my friend Abby shared her story a couple weeks ago) and (b) the need for a more gender-neutral discourse about eating disorders in our society. O’Neil sums it up well: “[A]s much as our generations-long assumptions about how men are supposed to behave and feel…

I still remember my first semester of Orgo as a post-bacc student, when my friend Erin sat with me in the library and did her best to explain the concept of chirality. She stretched her palms in front of me and asked me to imagine a mirror plane between them: right and left were mirror images of each other. She folded her palms together to bring the point home. “But no matter what,” she said, “I can’t stack my right palm on top…

I don’t have many photos of myself. If you were to enter my apartment, you’d find a few framed pictures of my mom and one of me at age eight or nine, all pigtails and missing front teeth, smiling directly to the camera. I love the lack of inhibition in the photo, the sweet confidence. I hang onto the image as a reminder that as a child, I was unashamed of being seen. I came into life with this quality, and it’s always there, no matter…

In the last few months, I’ve been reminded of why we use expressions like “heartache” or “broken heart.” It’s something you forget once your heart has been patched up and healed from whatever its last injury was, but the loss of love can be physically painful. It’s a heaviness, an ache in the chest. We read and hear about this all the time, but somehow it’s always surprising to experience it firsthand. I was thinking about this when I read Brian Doyle’s 2004 essay on the capacity…