White stripes and pandemic silver

I found my first grey when I was 21 years old and started coloring my hair when I was 26. At that point, I stopped knowing how much of my hair was its original color – dark brown – and how much came out of a bottle. I’m now double that age, and in the …

Are you a witch?

"Are you a witch?" a three-year-old girl asked me a few days ago. I was walking my dog past her house, and we'd struck up a conversation. As soon as the words had left the little girl's mouth, her mother looked the way mothers do when their toddlers blunder obliviously into faux pas. Horrified, she …

Mehri’s Story: Persecution and Faith

I am half-Iranian but have never been to Iran. I grew up in Edinburgh, and the closest I’ve ever been to visiting my mother’s home country was in 1978, when my Scottish father was offered a job at a Tehran university. At the time, the country was one of the most westernized in the Middle …

Scarred for Life: Ted Meyer

https://youtu.be/g_HOIg1qV9A "I may look similar to all of you but I'm different. Just slightly different. One mutation actually. I was born with Gaucher's Disease, a rare genetic illness that kept me going in and out of the hospital when I was a kid." At the age of 14, Ted Meyer felt like his life was …

Ed Sheeran: “Being weird is a wonderful thing”

I've just watched this video from 2015, and thought it was worth sharing. It's singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran talking at a gala for the American Institute for Stuttering. He starts by saying, "I was a very, very, very weird child" and takes it from there. Well worth watching. https://youtu.be/K_3r3SolyDs

Race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership

Today - February 19th, 2017 - is the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. And in the current political climate, it's a day that invites considerable reflection. Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, allowing the Secretary of War to create special military zones within the US. It led …

Meghan Markle: More than an Other

When I lived in the UK and was asked my identity, I always checked the box for 'Other'. I'm Scottish-Persian, and that made sense there, where Persians are Asian, not white. In the US, where I live now, Persian is considered Caucasian, so I've been tending to check 'Caucasian', in order to play by the …

The power of adversity

I've read a lot recently on the subject of failure - and how we need to learn how to fail. Most of this conversation has been in the context of raising children. In other words, we can't just hand out participation ribbons to kids when they don't win. They have to cry and have tantrums. They have …

Ugly

By guest blogger Alan McArthur A punk tattooist named Ugly. OK. It's Thailand - where your nickname comes before your real name. And you do get some odd ones. Nasty, his friend. Yep, actually a really nice guy, like Ugly. The subject's the Otherworld. Where the Others live. And who is an OTHER. Another oddball, …

Nori Shirasu: moonwalking… and writing his own script

Nori Shirasu is many things - a fine artist, a performance artist and an actor. He paints, he dances, he mimes, sometimes he teaches calligraphy and anime, he's writing a book - the list is pretty limitless. Within minutes of meeting him earlier this year, we got talking about not fitting in. Originally from Nagoya, …