Kartik

“When my patients ask me what mental health means, here’s what I tell them: Mental health doesn’t involve the aim of eradicating uncomfortable emotions and life stressors. Rather, mental health involves practicing healthy ways to roll with, and grow from, life’s punches. It involves a state of mental functioning in which a person can experience productivity, satisfied relationships, meaning and purpose, high quality of life and possess the ability to cope with adversity.”
― Jonathan N. Stea, Mind the Science: Saving your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry

“Bianchi’s landmark paper on microchimerism describes pregnancy as enacting a ‘long-term, low-grade chimeric state in the human female’. From the moment I was pregnant, I didn’t just feel different. I was different. I am different. On a cellular level. I would never be singular again.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“Besides, as a model, Lucky was used to people taking pleasure in proving she was an idiot. It was a kind of protection against inadequacy, she assumed; if she was pretty but dumb, they could still feel superior, even a little righteous, finding, in their own lack of marketable beauty, a confirmation of their higher intelligence. But if the two weren’t causal? If it was possible to be both professionally attractive and smart? Then their own average looks served no purpose other than to disappoint, with Lucky acting as the hapless reminder. She’d found, in general, it was easier to keep her mouth shut and let people think whatever comforting thoughts they wanted about her. People seemed to hate her less that way.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Martin snorted. It shouldn’t be funny. There was nothing funny about what happened to Will, and only in his darker moods did Martin find much humor in his own predicament. But still he was laughing, and when he looked over, saw that Will was smiling, one hand over his mouth. It felt like —he couldn’t think of anything less theatrical than miracle—that they were standing here, alive, relatively well in mind and body, and laughing about everything that had happened.”
― Cat Sebastian, Two Rogues Make a Right