People often wonder how I could split from my family.

My brother has bawled me out over this more than once.

I get it, I totally get it. From their point of view, you only make a mentally ill mother worse by running out on her. And I can see that — I can.

But, at some point, you have to consider your own needs.

I really didn’t have a family at all.

I started to understand this when I got brave enough to explain my real feelings about a career I felt stuck in. …

How many times have I heard it?

“We shouldn’t pay people who do unskilled jobs enough to live on.”

I haven’t heard many liberals make this case. Mostly this is a conservative viewpoint, and the arguments for it are few and repetitive.

“It’s just grunt work. It isn’t fair to people who work to ‘better themselves’ if somebody just doing a grunt work job makes as much as they do. These people are just too lazy to ‘better’ themselves!”

(An aside: How, exactly, do we define “better?” Another common way American society defines “better” is by body size, shape, and…

Thanks to a couple of thoughtful articles on Medium, I have now finally understood why it is that “born-again” Christians are calling Trump “Biblical” and laying hands on him, sure that “God anointed him to be president.” (And I’m quite thankful for the great articles and writers on here, because this was one question that has had me stumped for quite some time.)

Basically, what they’re saying is that, even though Trump says a lot of idiotic things on the world stage, even though he’s clearly a narcissist, even though he implies that neo-Nazis are “decent people,” and even though…

That's very nice, but look at the people who stayed together when alcohol abuse or wife beating or child abuse was going on. Look at all the covert child sexual abuse that was going on behind closed doors and all the lives that were ruined while everyone pasted smiling faces on and nobody ever, ever suspected. Look at all the miserable people who were forced to marry when they were actually gay. Oh, the '50's, "when things were better!"

I know because my mother was one of these victims. Our family was NEVER healthy, even though my grandparents stayed together…

Uh, yeah, I could barely believe this myself. The one time was wild enough, but, as of today, now it’s happened twice.

Okay, let me backtrack …

Incident One

I’d been dumped. Badly, badly dumped. I know you all know what this feels like.

But when they left you to go back to a marriage that sucked, and they told you about some behavior from the spouse that strongly implied it was going to continue to suck …

… You can’t imagine why they wouldn’t come back. Surely this person is going to see the light before too long, right?

Even my…

Hello, The Thinking Other Woman here.

Some may not know that I am a student astrologer.

I am, and the reason I am: This emotional affair I had with a married guy.

Now, you may scoff, and you may laugh, but even the most cursory examination of our three natal charts on the free apps on astro.com tells you three things right up front:

1. My Venus is in House 12: The House of Secret Love Affairs.
2. He has Mars in Gemini: Prone to infidelity.
3. She has Saturn in House 5:

“Circumstances may oblige you to appear humble and patient in…

Something weird happened this week:

All of my last four articles got curated. (Not the fiction … the articles.)

How did that happen? Because I never get curated.

Here’s what I think happened:

1. I got invited to write for a publication that, it would appear, the curators are watching. I got curated in “Infidelity” twice, and when I went to look (savoring the experience, as I never get curated), there were a bunch of other articles from that same pub’s front page. Apparently the curator tasked with populating the “Infidelity” tag has decided The Scarlett Letter is a go-to source.
2. …

Two evenings later Anakin contacted the Chancellor at home, in secret. He was no longer sure what he wanted or where he stood, but before he could begin to decide, there was something he had to know.

“May I come over sometime soon and talk to you? I’m sorry to invite myself to your home, but I…I don’t want Sereine to know.”

“Anakin, of course. Of course you may.”

Anakin hadn’t entered the Chancellor’s private apartments since he was nine. …