Authentically Beautiful
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Life is truly too wonderful to spend wishing to be someone else.
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Turning the Lights On: My Body and Motherhood
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Any self-confidence buzzing within my grasp was snatched up at the sight of stretch marks and extra weight looking back at me from the mirror. Not to mention what pregnancy and nursing did to my breasts.
Read MoreI'm Visible Now: Reflections On Beauty and Self-Image
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After a lifetime of feeling invisible, a photo shoot opens the door to self-discovery and beauty.
Read MoreSick & Tired: One Woman's Journey to Less Stress
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Something was wrong, yet no one could tell Breanna why her body was giving out.
Read MoreThe Brain Freefall
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I have three wonderful kids and a military husband. When something hurts, I ignore it. I don’t have time for it. If that doesn’t work, I take some Ibuprofen. If that doesn’t work, I try harder to ignore it, and eventually it just becomes a normal everyday type of pain and I get used to it and move on - power through the pain. But what happens when it doesn’t get better? What happens when the pain and numbness in your left arm starts to spread, and it gets so bad you finally do something about it only to find out things are going to get so much worse before they get better?
Read MoreYou Are Your Most Important Relationship
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Self-love is not just bubble baths and face masks, it goes far beyond that.
Read MoreIntroducing HLW: A Free Digital Magazine for Writers
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HLW is a community of people who love the written word. It's a monthly membership filled with tools to help our writers continue to do what they do best - write. And we're there to cheer them on every step of the way.
Read MoreMy Traumatic Birth Experience Changed My Daughter's Life
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Within milliseconds, he twisted her head about, yanked her neck out, and paralyzed her. Just like that. I roared a long-winded murderous scream, so loud and full, that I know a part of myself died in those seconds.
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Protecting Myself: Three Lessons the Secret Service Taught Me
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Lessons on life + love can come from unexpected places - like the Secret Service.
Read MoreBreastfeeding and a Mother's Intuition
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We’re expecting our second baby in November and I’m planning to breastfeed once again. I’m going in with the same mindset, though – if it’s not working out for the baby or me, then we’ll switch to formula. After all, meeting my baby’s basic needs is the most important thing on my list.
Read MoreLiquid Gold: My Breastfeeding Journey
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Breastfeeding is a commitment - one that can be really hard for new mothers.
Read MoreReflections After Divorce: Am I Enough?
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I finally cried and let go of the dream of “maybe someday” with him. And the weight began to lessen.
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How to Use Creativity to Fuel Your Transformation
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Art was for other people. People who didn’t make money. People who didn’t take life seriously, wore sandals, and had all the time in the world to sit around and play with paint all day. A decade or so later, something shifted.
Read MoreCreation in One's Self
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I don’t know for certain that my writing is of any importance to others, but still I write.
Read MoreRedeeming Memories Lost to Anxiety
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When my husband asked me to marry him, it really was a fairy-tale perfect, Instagram-worthy proposal of proposals. He did everything I could have dreamt of...and I missed it.
Read MoreRelationship Anxiety
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Ten months into the best relationship of my life, I freaked out. I remember the moment it happened too - as if a switch was turned on and I needed to get out now. Thoughts like we can’t do this anymore; how do I know he’s the one; we have to break up were repeated over and over in my head like a broken record.
Read MoreThe Courage to Recover From My Eating Disorder
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In my eating disorder, I held in all my emotions and numbed them out by starving myself, exercising past the point of exhaustion, and repeatedly throwing up. Now that I was no longer turning to those behaviors, everything that I pushed down flooded in like water from a broken levee.
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