Chicana on the Edge

Mentioning the unmentionable since 2004

How To Be Unemployed

Don’t punish yourself.

The Good, the Bad, the Old and the Young

Thinking about the good old days? Stop it.

Things Will Get Better. Here’s Why.

As bad as everything seems in 2026, I have hope!

Exercise That Feels GOOD (and I Don’t Mean Morally)

Previous post on this topic: I want to bend easily again After years of being a gym rat (and between size 6 and 10), I stopped all exercise last March, except for dog walking and yoga classes at my workplace. Since there haven’t been any workplace yoga classes since...

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Write Club: Great for Writers and Listeners

http://writeclubrules.com The first rule of Write Club is to tell five to seven other people about Write Club, so here I go. Write Club takes two writers and gives them opposing themes to write an essay about. They prepare this essay ahead of time and it must take no...

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I Want to Bend Easily Again

I Want to Bend Easily Again

(Can you find the dog in this photo?) Previous post on this topic: Gaining 25 pounds in 3 months I want to be part of the fat acceptance movement, but I'm having doubts. The 25 pounds I put on since October have added to and subtracted from my happiness. I love...

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Hotel Metro, Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA

Hotel Metro, Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA

Fancy hotel room with dog   Beautiful bathroom with oversized tub and Ozzie's dog dishes in the back. Monday, January 21, besides being Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Inauguration Day, was one of the coldest days of the year. In Chicago temperatures stayed in the...

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Die, Inner Critic, Die!

Sitting in my weekly EFT tapping circle, I tapped as I listened to topics like family dynamics, self-nurture and the feeling of not being good enough. As I tapped, my feelings of not being good enough and being too fat, grew. "I really hate myself," I thought, as I...

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Gaining 25 pounds in 3 months

Previous post on this topic: How to be overweight When one suddenly becomes chubby after being not-chubby all one's life, one might do the following: 1. One might hate how tight everything fits. 2. One might hate buying new clothes, which is not fun if the reason is...

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Blasting Through Zombie-Like Depression

A one-on-one session with Lili Betancourt has melted the frozen suppressed anger that’s had me down (see yesterday's blog photo). Locked into emotions I couldn’t release on my own, unable to focus or function, I made an emergency appointment for her powerful blend of...

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Not Quite Alone

Not Quite Alone

The Black Dog by Regina Rodríguez-Martin I took this photo with my Macbook Pro. It's me with a black dog and another black dog ("black dog" is a metphor for depression). I felt very alone when I took this even though I wasn't quite alone.

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One Dog’s Reaction to Extreme Emotion

One Dog’s Reaction to Extreme Emotion

The owner of the dog lay in bed until after 10:00 a.m. with the dog's body curled up next to hers in the blankets. After a brief phone call, she began to weep loudly. The dog, still in his relaxed position, pricked up his ears. At the first shriek, the dog's head...

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Down

What causes a depressive episode? Not staying on the meds consistently enough? Actual external events? Random fluctuations of body chemistry? For those of us with chronic depression it can feel like the trigger is nothing that's within our control and that leads us to...

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I Care about Myself More Than the World

(By the way: Happy New Year! I hope.) One morning as I walked to the train station, someone handed me a booklet entitled "25 Reasons to Try Vegetarian." Not counting the front and back covers, it's 14 pages of persuasive writing with excellent presentation and quality...

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Any Humans Out There?

Dear Person Reading My Blog Right Now: If you wouldn't mind leaving me a comment, I'd hugely appreciate it. A lot of the hits that any blog gets are automated search engines and websites. So if I see that my blog got 30 visits, that really means that some fraction of...

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