It's something I always think about before I fall asleep at night—like when I'm half-asleep, the images will just float into my head not for any particular reason, just because that's what happens whenever I try to sleep. At my worst times it becomes a reason to stay up as late as possible because at least if I'm…

Thank you. It was hard to talk about for a long time (and I never told my parents about it because that would be a recipe for a nightmare) but I finally realized that if we ever want experiences like mine (with harassment, anxiety, AND depression—the trifecta!) to become less stigmatized, someone has to get talking.

Definitely been there before. The worst is having an irregular period so I never know if it's PMS or just random depression. It's a fun guessing game!

I'm sorry you dealt with that. The dorm system is a horrible, broken evil thing that makes so many people's lives hell. The college system in general is so terrible at dealing with harassment, it's actually astonishing. There was a boy in the same dorm as me who was very threatening to me—sending me violent and sexual…

I know that it's not an RA's job to deal with their residents' psychological issues, but you'd think that they'd get training to do something other than "belittle the freshmen."

I remember trying to explain to her that I wasn't so much afraid of judgement as afraid that I was going to see mutilated corpses (my college was in a high crime area and I was convinced that the entire school was going to be massacred sooner rather than later) and seeing the look of blank incomprehension on her face.…

Ah, the old "calm down" schtick. I have the joy of anxiety as well, and my favorite experience with that came my freshman year of college, when I was getting panic attacks so badly that it was starting to be difficult for me to even leave my dorm room. My RA came into my room and told me that I needed to "stop being…

Absolutely. My last bout of really, really bad depression happened very recently, and part of what made it so horrible is that I honestly had no reason to feel so awful. In some ways it helps to be able to focus on certain things and pretend they're the source of the depression, like I feel this way because of this…

First off, thank you for this article, Marah.

I feel you. I'm still in a situation where I have to see my older sister a lot of the time, but it's taken me until very recently to realize that I truly hate her as a person. My family takes it for granted that she uses me as a target to vent all of her emotional frustrations, but they all kind of shrug and go "Well,…

Jeff was cute. I tweeted something about rooting for him and his sister tweeted me back thanking me for the support—extra cute! So I was glad he won. I felt kind of bad for Cooper, who just looked so SAD the entire time he was playing. It was like Jeopardy was breaking his heart.

Dragons and their riders were telepathically linked, so when the dragons wanted to mate with each other, their riders had to have sex as well. This created all sorts of fucked up consent issues, especially with the main protagonist of the original trilogy, who ends up essentially getting raped repeatedly by her love…

I don't remember him being gay and nothing on Google backs that up, though in retrospect he totally does seem like he should be.

Yeah, that's probably fair. Still beyond horrifying, though.

Yeah, there was all this weird shit about how the greenriders were sexually submissive men because the green dragons were female (but infertile) so the men had to act out the "women's role" in the fucked up dragon sex mind meld thing that happened whenever dragons mated. This is all stuff that I discovered much later…

I wish I was capable of making this shit up. The books themselves have really weird sexual politics overall (gay men exist in the novels, but they are automatically the lowest level dragonriders who can never ascend to leadership positions in the weyr…also rape is totally okay because dragons!).

I LOVED these books as a kid. They were somewhat ruined for me by discovering that the author is one of those people who thinks homosexuals are the scum of the earth. The infamous quote: "It's a proven fact that a single anal sex experience causes one to be homosexual. The hormones released by a sexual situation…

Sometimes I accidentally read Family Circus and then I feel dirty for the rest of the day. There's a reason why the Mayor on Buffy loved Family Circus.

I'm someone who's always wanted to get into superhero comics (I wasn't allowed to read them as a kid because they were "too nerdy" and my parents were crossing my fingers that I would magically turn into some super athletic wonder child instead of the fantasy-reading shut-in that I ultimately became) but I didn't…

I always want to play as Daisy because she is a princess with brown hair and that's all I need to feel an emotional connection to a Mario Kart character, but her dress is so fucking ugly that I just can't do it. Yellow dresses are BAD, people. It made me turn away from Belle as a kid when she is the Disney princess…