Ariel Gore
Ariel Gore
Ariel Goreis a journalist, memoirist, novelist, nonfiction author, and teacher. She is the founding editor/publisher of Hip Mama, an Alternative Press Award-winning publication covering the culture and politics of motherhood. Through her work on Hip Mama, Gore is widely credited with launching maternal feminism and the contemporary mothers' movement. "It's the quality of the writing that sets Hip Mama apart," The New Yorker noted. Gore's fiction and nonfiction work also explores creativity, spirituality, queer culture, and positive psychology...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth25 June 1970
CountryUnited States of America
I've never been socially outgoing, but I suspect I've gotten more and more ambivalent about making new friends. I'm irritated by how-do-you-do chit-chat, but that's how new relationships usually begin.
Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.
My own habit had always been to write about the things that ticked me off in a given day. If I kept a journal at all, I kept it to vent.
In my experience, staying in a marriage that my ex and I both agreed had all its best moments behind it was epically depressing.
I'm sure there were plenty of loving, attentive mothers in the 'me generation,' but none of them lived at my house.
I always do like seeing other people dance in their cars. It's one of the things that makes me happy.
When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.
I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree - most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got plenty of ancestors who played out more tortured hands.
If you need help or advice, ask for it, but don't worry too much about hurting other people's feelings by not doing what they say. If your gut says no, trust it. Do what seems right.
Conventional wisdom tells us we'll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.
In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.
I think there are different kinds of happiness. We know when we're happy a lot of the time, but then there are those moments that have more of an afterglow, when the happiness has more depth.
When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.
New Agers have always told us that we create our own realities. Mind over matter.