Diana Whitney
Touching danger
Afterward, I wondered whether my father understood there was danger at the Afghan border.
My father thrived on adventure. He had joined the Merchant Marine at age 16 and later driven his blue Alfa Romeo across Europe and a battered VW bus through the Serengeti. He was famous for making ill-considered decisions and delighted in emerging untouched from disaster. When I was a baby in England, he'd taken my mother out in a tiny sailboat and nearly capsized in a storm off the Cornish coast.
Beyond my burden of shame
At the Women’s March on Washington, I was expecting outrage, catharsis, and the solidarity of strong women. What I wasn’t expecting were the men.
My pre-teen daughters didn't want to go to Washington, D.C., and I didn't push it, not wanting to force them into any activity against their will, be it cross-country skiing, hugging, or political protest. To be honest, I was relieved to have space for my own experience, to travel...
Talking Trump with my daughters
I have to tell my two preteens: our country doesn’t care about women and girls — or not enough to keep a sexist bigot from the most powerful position in the world
Like so many dazed parents the morning after the election, I tried to explain to my daughters what had happened while they slept. How our country had elected a racist, misogynist bully for a president. How there would not be a woman in the White House, as we'd naïvely...
More
A matter of survival
Stunned at the news of Robin Williams' suicide, I drove to teach yoga last week through leafy late-summer mist, half numb with sadness, amazed at my own survival. In 2002 and 2003, I, too, was suicidal, caught in a downward spiral of severe depression, anxiety, and chronic pain that would not relent. I'd struggled with brief cyclical depression since high school, but this was something different. The symptoms were acutely physical, not just ambient melancholy, self-doubt, or negativity. This time,