Jenna

“short term always leaves us in a place worse off than when we started. — To properly heal from addiction, we need a holistic approach. We need to create a life we don’t need to escape. We need to address the root causes that made us turn outside ourselves in the first place. This means getting our physical health back, finding a good therapist, ending or leaving abusive relationships, learning to reinhabit our bodies, changing our negative thought patterns, building support networks, finding meaning and connecting to something greater than ourselves, and so on. To break the cycle of addiction, we need to learn to deal with cravings, break old habits, and create new ones. To address all of this is an overwhelming task, but there is a sane, empowering, and balanced approach. But before we discuss how to implement solutions to the Two-Part Problem, we need to address one of the bigger issues that women and other historically oppressed folks need to consider, which is how patriarchal structures affect the root causes of addiction, how they dominate the recovery landscape, and what that means for how we experience recovery. If we are sick from sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, microaggressions, misogyny, ableism, American capitalism, and so on—and we are—then we need to understand how recovery frameworks that were never built with us in mind can actually work against us, further pathologizing characteristics, attributes, and behaviors that have been used to keep us out of our power for millennia. We need to examine what it means for us individually and collectively when a structure built by and for upper-class white men in the early twentieth century dominates the treatment landscape.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Americans are addicted to plausible deniability.”
― Lindy West, The Witches are Coming

“Is there a woman who has lost her temper in public and didn’t face ridicule, temporary ruin, or both? Can you think of one?”
― Lindy West, The Witches are Coming

“People love to watch viral videos in which one kindly fisherman saves one sea turtle from a snarl of trash; they are less passionate about electing politicians who will dismantle policies that entrench corporate power and allow companies to pump poison into the oceans and skies in order to shore up the immoral wealth of billionaires and further destabilize the lives of the poor who will remain locked in toil until the planet boils us all to death as Jeff Bezos waves good-bye from his private rocket. Strange!”
― Lindy West, The Witches are Coming