HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.
Who would have thought we’d be back here again? Me, blinded by your headlamp, white-knuckling a tooth-shaped stress toy with your name and number printed on it. You, on your swivel stool, tapping your running shoes to the eighties soft rock that seeps through the walls like the smell of the salmon your assistant reheated for lunch.
Read MoreAnd to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Read MoreMy brother props his long legs on the dashboard of Dad’s pristine Honda. He presses his feet in their sweaty black socks into the windshield hard enough to leave `a smudge, a crime our eighty-five year-old father swoops on like a hawk.
Read MoreDespite my vigorous scrubbing, the damn sixty-four ounce, “self-detect container” (manufacturer jargon) looks like it has a thin coat of pond scum coating the clear pitcher. How are pond scum and spirulina different? I wonder. Each time I enter the kitchen, I’m blind to the clean counters and floors. All I can concentrate on is this disgusting Vitamix.
Read MoreMy relationship with material objects is somewhat fraught from my upbringing, from my family’s relationship with them. There’s trauma associated, passed down through my parents, particularly my father. My dad was a hoarder, and it extended beyond his own possessions. My mom, myself, and siblings often wanted to get rid of some of our personal things, things that weren’t his.
Read MoreWhen I was a little girl between the ages of six and eleven, I loved Barbie dolls. In my child-mind, Barbies (not just Barbie, but the other dolls in the line like Ken, Skipper, and Midge), with their anatomically incorrect, smooth, hairless, nipple-less, sex-organ-less bodies, silky hair, and infinite array of matching outfits represented the untarnished, uncomplicated yet glamorous life I might build for myself.
Read MoreMy pelvic floor is broken. The PT slides her fingers inside me and presses on a spot at the back of my vagina. A jolt of pain shoots through the inside of my ass. Not exactly my ass, it’s too far forward, but like the outside of the inside of my ass. It’s a hot spark deep inside where the tissue is tender and aching beneath the rock-hard surface of nebulous vaginal-anal space.
Read MoreBesides my husband, I have lived with no other being longer than Mullen. When we lived in Austin, after I suffered a miscarriage, my husband saw a pitiful ginger tabby kitten at an adoption fair. If we had any reservations, they were nullified when the adoption volunteer gave us Mullen’s history; his was the saddest tale in the shelter. A few weeks old, he had been found in a plastic bag, riddled with fleas and mange, cast away on the side of Mo-Pac.
Read MoreThe clock in the kitchen screams at me through the quiet. Tick.
I sort my emails because categories make sense. I re-arrange the salt, bananas, and paper towels because I propagate structure. I compose paragraphs in my head because I make the things I need. Tick.
Read MoreEach day begins and ends with the pill tray. In the morning, it’s the antipsychotic Abilify, anti-anxiety Buspar, and antidepressant Prozac. In the evening, Buspar returns with the famed mood stabilizer, lithium. Within the first four hours of waking, I’ll know if I haven’t taken my medications by a sudden tightness in my chest or a nervous tingling across my skin. When this happens, I rush to choke down a cracker or two before taking them.
Read MoreI’m not sure the recommended accompaniment to 20 mg of beta-blockers is a slug of flat white, but it works for now. Stimulation, tranquilization. Push, pull. Like the tide. Like the sea when you watch it from the dunes, the froth sucking in and out.
Read MoreI began losing my eyesight when I was three – a result of poor genetics and squinting at the television too often. My sight worsened until I was nineteen; by then, I was nearly legally blind and opted to have my vision corrected through surgery. Until that point, losing my eyesight afforded me both a gift and a curse – the gift of insight and the curse of knowledge. I saw the world in layers of truths and half-truths, of what people thought they knew and what actually happened behind closed doors.
Read MoreThe internet has made and destroyed me in equal measure.
Picture this: I'm eleven years old, and we've just gotten our first family computer. I was some months into secondary school, having spent the first few months working from a local library whilst my mum read magazines in a corner. It was clear very early on, the things I'd explore on the internet. Yes, you've guessed it. My future.
Read MoreInsecurities are a bitch. It’s just one of those things that comes with life—something that each of us have for different reasons. For her, her arms were the one place on her body where she felt the most vulnerable. It was the one place on her body where she felt the most exposed, so she did her best to keep them hidden.
Read MoreI’m sitting on the bench, this time with my pants on, at my midwife’s office.
I’m here because I’m certain I’m off and completely uncertain about what I need to fix it.
Or if I need to fix it.
Or if I can fix it.
Or if it’s even fixable.
I’m here for a postpartum depression evaluation.
Everyone gets sick from time to time, it’s inevitable. From a minor cold to an infection that requires recovery in a hospital, the process in which the body repairs itself is all part of being human. Sometimes our skin tears, our bones break, and our organs don’t function properly. Some medical illnesses may take more time and energy to diagnose, like the kinds of illnesses that are usually portrayed in TV programs like Chicago Med, House, or Mystery Diagnosis. Finding a cure, regardless of how big or small the illness is, is what those who aren’t well and their loved ones wish for. In an ideal world everyone would get better, but this doesn’t always happen.
Read MoreBorn pre-Google (PG) and it is a mystery how I, not knowing I was (ASD) Autism
Spectrum Disorder, survived fairly happy, optimistic, and somewhat whole. All
those years, the feeling of being an alien enshrouded me, yet I wouldn't give up
trying to fit in. Didn't know anything about it but in the 1980s, when my son was
diagnosed and then I was, well, I just did what I always did: slipped into denial
mode.
I started meditating to try to get more focus and ease some of the edgy anxiety that’s always been native to my personality. I used HeadSpace, an app created by Andy Puddicome, to try to get a handle on it. I wasn’t a natural. I’d sit still. Breathe. But my brain jumped relentlessly from one set of thoughts to another.
Read MoreA few weeks after turning eighteen, I packed my belongings into my boyfriend’s car and left for Western Washington University. In a short year and a half, I would drop out after struggling with drug and alcohol abuse and an eating disorder, symptoms of mental health conditions that went undiagnosed until years after I left school.
Read More“Actually that is part of a whole therapy method: dialectical behavior therapy. I want you to do DBT when you finish up the program here. I think it’s really going to be a good next step for you.”
Those words were from D, the lead therapist for my intensive outpatient program at my local psychiatric hospital. A single assignment, and that statement, started me down a rabbit hole of online reading and research that ultimately brought me to where I am today.
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