Our obsession with power, and how the mental health system fails us all.
I, like many others, couldn’t resist Framing Britney, The New York Times’ documentary about the 12-year conservatorship Britney Spears has been under by her father. However, the overarching narrative coming out of this seems to be that the way we dealt with mental health and women 12 years ago is somehow detached and different from today. We’ve progressed some, but to isolate Britney’s experience as if it’s trapped in a time capsule ignores the most important parts. …
And why I no longer trust art critics.
I was not going to watch this movie. Netflix was pushing it on me which made sense: it’s Zendaya, John David Washington, and Sam Levinson, but it also has 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, 53% on Metacritic, and 6.7/10 on IMDb. There was some talk about it being a revenge film targeting critics and there also wasn’t the best said about the script, though everyone seemed to agree that the acting was incredible.
Truth be told, the second I see a Rotten Tomato score of less than 80% I will probably keep scrolling to find another thing to watch, and if…
How to purposefully pause and individually take a step back in a time where it’s essential to be taking collective steps forward.
Author Meghan Daum suggests when picking an event to write about you should pick one that is far enough in the past so as to have the gift of perspective. The more distance we have from a subject, the more we can clearly see it, pick it apart, and understand it.
Perspective has been feeling more and more impossible as we enter into a new year of the pandemic. We’re unable to accurately process time’s passing, unable to see it from different angles, and, in certain moments, unable to see it at all. …
What my childhood self taught me about holding on and letting go
My hair grew long the summer I couldn’t sleep. My grandma’s cat died that summer. I was young but old enough to understand that when one thing changes everything will in time, inevitably change. Some things happen quickly, but other things will happen slowly. You’ll be unaware of their effects until months later when new growth is sprouting in place of what used to be. Morning after morning you’ll wake with a new piece of yourself to get used to, a new piece to listen to and to learn how to care for.
I’ve come to refer to this process…
In a dating landscape where “no” is never enough and media almost always revolves around sex, what happens when you take it off the table?
At the ripe age of 21, I was learning that our perceptions of people and places, most often, rarely meet their reality. Emotionally depleted from a corporate job and challenging my understanding of relationships, I moved across the country to a place where I knew only one or two people, to a place where I could seemingly, guilt and distraction-free, focus on the one thing I felt I had never been able to: myself.
My next move was the mistake of (genuinely) putting “looking for friends” in my Tinder bio. I had learned that although strides were being made for…
Katherine Sullivan
I like to read and write about why we are the way we are and reimagine what we could be.
