Frank Brown

You know it’s okay to need people, right?

To ask for help? We know that a lot of people believe that you should be out here pulling yourself up by your bootstraps but we’d like to propose an alternative: that we put out our hand when we need help, and let someone else do the pulling. And when we’re up and steady, we reach back and offer a hand.

We know that evil does not exist in nature, something to which the movie subtly alludes: a wounded deer cannot be blamed if it goes berserk and attacks a human being, any more than a wayward ember can be held accountable for starting a blaze. Hamaguchi reminds us of our foolishness in assuming that we operate, as human beings, on a higher plane, th... See more

we are not unwell or broken. We are simply becoming ourselves

Then, shortly after our daughter Gwen was born, as I understand it goes, my marriage was revealed for what it was. I had a lifelong (and unmanaged) mental health issue, and my husband had an addiction (also unmanaged) to alcohol. Now that we had a baby, we could no longer ignore our unwieldy foundations.

I needed to quiet the constant voice in my head wondering why we still didn’t measure up, why we hadn’t accomplished more, why more people didn’t like us, why were we always so alone?

what I value most in a relationship are, in ever-shifting order, humor, empathy, intelligence, understanding and surprise.

The only way I knew to accommodate the duality in me was to drink.

Conservatives also believe themselves to be factory-default humans (with obvious demographic implications) and everyone else to be aberrations, errors, and defects in need of recall.