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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…

Happy Memorial Day, to those of you who are celebrating, and happy Monday to those who aren’t. It’s gray and cold here today, but the city had sun and perfect spring temperatures yesterday, and I had the very nice treat of having my Mom over for a simple supper at my place. One of the bigger adjustments I’ve faced in this new chapter is no longer having someone to share my food with every night. It isn’t all bad, or all sad; I’ve…

Happy Sunday, friends. A lot of you have already tried this past week’s curried tahini pasta salad and given it a thumbs up, which makes me so happy to hear! I’m already excited to make it again. I’ve spent the last two days catching up on all of the stuff I didn’t take care of while I was wrapping up my spring semester: unanswered emails, chores, errands, cleaning, that sort of thing. There won’t be much of a breather this year, as my…

Happy Sunday, all, and a very happy Mother’s Day to those of you who are celebrating today. This day has me thinking a lot about my mom and how grateful I am to her right now. I know I haven’t made things easy for her in the last year or so. I did a lot of soul searching last spring, as I waded through the mucky waters of depression, and much of that work involved delving into parts of my past I’d never…

The process of clicking around in search of links for these weekend reading posts is always full of surprise and discovery. It’s often filled with emotion, too—grief, sadness, or excitement, depending on what I find and how it strikes me. This week, my heart ached and then celebrated along with Lily, who bravely shared her story of returning to the kitchen space after her mother’s death on Food52. “My mother was my portal into the world of the senses,” Lily writes. “She taught…

Each Sunday, I publish a post that includes personal musings and articles on medicine, science, and the human experience. These are reminders that health and wellness extend far beyond what's on our plates.