Thanksgiving this year was a surprise. For weeks, I looked forward to it as being a homecoming of sorts. It was the first Thanksgiving that my mom and I have had on our own since 2012, when we ate at Candle 79. We did the same this year, and I think a part of me expected the whole ritual to be as if nothing had changed. I thought it might momentarily feel the way things did before the end of my post-bacc, before…

A couple weeks ago, a reader passed along Carrie Arnold’s insightful article into treatment of chronic, adult anorexia. It’s been a long time since any reading material about EDs has brought up so much emotion for me. One reason may be that much of what I read about anorexia is focused on teens and young adults. I was eleven when I became anorexic for the first time, which means that the disease and its relapses shaped my adolescence and early adulthood. With each…

Early this week, I was flipping through Yoga Journal and found an article from the magazine’s archives, written by Keith Kachtick, about impermanence. It was written in 2008; in it, Kachtick recalls being on a trip to Miami, shell-shocked by the realization that his marriage was ending. Ambling through South Beach by himself, he stumbled on an exhibition of Tibetan art and culture that featured six Buddhist lamas completing a sand mandala in public. “[I]t was the first moment of genuine ease I’d…

Just yesterday afternoon, I stumbled on this piece of photojournalism. It describes what refugee families in the Diffa region of Niger are eating with the few food staples they can obtain. Buzzfeed reports, Nearly one in five people are victims of food insecurity in landlocked Niger, one of the poorest in the world. The reasons are both man-made and natural. The vast, largely agrarian country experiences a rainy season for only two months each year — and, with climate change causing havoc in…