Monday Matter: Unobliged women, wedding shopping and false passives

Your weekly Foreign Bodies roundup

Every Monday, we send subscribers and gift recipients of immigrant mental health and storytelling newsletter Foreign Bodies stories we recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz. Roundups are usually written by Fiza and edited by Farah.

First things first

A little housekeeping

What’s lifting my spirits these days

Good Monday morning, Foreign Bodies fam. I was overwhelmed by the kindness many of you showed me last week when I expressed guilt about needing to step away from the newsletter and from work. Thank you to those who emailed me privately or commented on the recent thread on coping with time-off guilt <3 I’ve been doing somewhat better thanks to some of the advice you all shared, including reframing my guilt of resting as a force of anti-capitalism (thanks, Alia!) Thought I’d share what else has been lifting my spirits these last few days:

• cooking pasta for my best friend

• this essay on anger from Foreign Bodies reader Courtney Cook

• weeknight dance parties to Doja Cat

• taking my parents and brother out in East Atlanta

• Turning Red

• the way I can listen to my body and know exactly what it needs, whether that’s rest, movement or medicine.

• fiction and fiction readers

• thoughtful book clubs

• finding the perfect birthday gift for a friend

• the rare, fun first date

• my grandparents and the pears they gave me

• refundable flights

• Lady, Billie and Scamper

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A musical start to your Mondays 🎧

One song to groove to, cry to, drive to and share

I pulled this week’s Alanis Morissette pick, a favorite of my very emo teenage self, from Stephanie Foo’s Spotify playlist on C-PTSD feelings, which the recent author of What My Bones Know shared on her Instagram page. The track caused some controversy when it came out in 2002, as it tells the story of an affair with an older man when Morissette was only 14 years old. Here’s what the singer-songwriter wrote in a track-by-track commentary on the album: “My intention in writing this song was to get to a place where I could be as truthful and as honest as I possibly could be about certain relationships in my past. It's definitely not with the intention of seeking any sort of revenge for the person who is at the heart of the song that I'm singing about, but it was in my silencing myself to protect somebody else that I was ultimately completely abandoning myself. And any time I speak untruths in my life, and often-times I feel by not speaking the truth, by being silent, there's an element of an untruth in that.”

Resource(s) of the week

Something helpful and interesting and cool (*storytelling opportunity)