It's a chilling picture of DARVO. — Content warning: Domestic abuse and parental alienation Many years ago, I found it very sad when Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd had to speak out over supposedly malicious comments being made about his fiancee Alice Evans on his own devoted fan site. How could fans be so cruel, I wondered. Frankly…

I do dumb stuff sometimes. — It's hard to keep secrets when you write openly about your life like I do. Sure, I sometimes keep some feelings a secret, sometimes keep my feelings unpacked or unprocessed, and I pretty often fail to reveal just how much I'm struggling to juggle my life as a single mom…

They're not great, folks — Content warning: some of the language in this story is deeply disturbing as there's discussion of artwork that focuses on rape, abuse, and murder, etc. Earlier this month, Andrea Burkhart turned to fellow Johnny Depp fans to crowdfund the $3,300 in fees to release previously sealed documents from Depp v…

I'm pretty sure the Twitter algorithms want us to fight with each other. Why? Because Twitter keeps recommending anti-trans tweets to me. In particular, they've been tipping me off to complaints about gender-neutral bathrooms or transgender bathroom policies. A gender-neutral bathroom is a facility that accepts anyone regardless of gender…

Sometimes, I still wish I was dead. — What is it about birthdays, anyway? Is it really another year older, another year wiser? Another year of joy or another year just trying to stay alive? I’m turning 40 in 9 days. I started writing about that yesterday, back when I still had 10 full days. But the days…

She's reduced it down to a gimmick. — I have to admit, this one initially caught me way off guard. It shouldn't have, since I know just how judgmental and shallow people can be, but I somehow expected more from Vanessa Lachey. Vanessa hosts a dating reality show with her husband Nick Lachey. The show is called "Love…

And I think that's okay. — My mother raised me and my older sister in the Twin Cities on welfare, food stamps, and Section 8. We were very, very poor. Ketchup on pasta, Campbell's condensed soup, and homemade pancake batter microwaved into coffee cake were frequent meals. Back then, free school lunches only existed for the…

What else is new... — Do you remember getting your very first death threat? I don't. There's been too many. Some death threats I've gotten are more memorable than others, of course. I remember how icky it felt when a man read this story and wrote that he would have killed a woman like me…

Guess I'm a blogging has-been... — It's not often that I get to promptly check out a story I've been tagged in on Medium, but this AM while I was working on a piece before I had to wake up my daughter, I saw that I'd been tagged in a story about the supposed top 10…