Brianne McDonald

What was it like growing up with a mentally ill mother? In a word?

1. You’re not just the ‘way you are.’ If you don’t like something about yourself, you can change it.

Maybe you hate your job, or your coworkers, or classes have just been really rough. Maybe you just feel a little ‘off’ today and you can’t really explain why. I offer you this playlist in hopes of easing (or heightening) your pain.

4. Your nail polish, if you’re even wearing any, is usually chipping or in varying degrees of chipped.

We fall in love with the idea of a person, of all the things we glimpse in small, rapid moments, and cling to those flashes with a desperation that can carry us on for years.

Mormons, like any other religion, are filled with wonderful, understanding and compassionate people as well as those whom are judgmental, harsh and unkind; the latter of which are far less common in my experience.

8. You have a Harry Potter wand that doubles as a T.V. remote. That might have been the moment I knew I loved you.

4. Go for a walk.

You can open the world (or just your social circle) to your views and opinions but for every person who agrees, there will be another who doesn’t.

A profound list of all the reasons I’m convinced on a daily (often hourly) basis that I do, in fact, suck at raising another human being.

As a sort of preface, I’m a single and, once upon a time, teenaged mother (back when I could run without crying and study all night without wanting to throw myself into oncoming traffic the next morning).

Reinvents herself in some way.