Even to me the issue of "stay small, sweet, quiet, and modest" sounds like an outdated problem, but the truth is that women still run into those demands whenever we find and use our voices.

Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we're all in this together.

If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.

Everything that these folks are saying that they're trying to move away from, like comparison, perfectionism, judgement, and exhaustion as a status symbol - that all describes my life. It was more like a medical researcher studying a disease and figuring out he or she has it.

Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.