Posts tagged mental health
Primer For One Left Behind

A / Anyone

You want to become anyone, a head placed on any random body. At the county fair, faces from the crowd fill the cut-outs where heads of farmers or cows should be. The souvenir photograph, a reminder of a new identity. You want to go into witness protection, become someone else, anyone else, an image the mirror recognizes. This is normal.

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Reminder: Be Durable Polyester Carpet In the Next Life

All “business professionals” crawl under their desks to cry, their bank account overdrawn (again), munching candy that coworkers slide beneath the plywood desktop. We all decorate our cubicle walls with drawings by our children, photos of our families, and potted plants that we fail to water, then revive, then fail again. All of us place small plastic goats to the left of our desktops that scream when we push down on them—wild, ugly, depraved screams that fill the room, saying “I’m okay. See? I’m fine.” Screams that ease laughs from workers drowning in hyper-focus, drowning in code, drowning in editing edits.

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Weekly Rituals

From October 2020 until February 2022, every Wednesday from 11:00 a.m. until 11:15 a.m., I dedicated my time to taking a shower. My weekly Wednesday ritual also included my virtual therapy session at 1:00 p.m., so I began my day changing out the week-old unwashed pajamas to shampoo and deep condition my hair, shaving my legs, and exfoliating my body. As I undress, starting with my crew socks, I focus on my parent’s medicine cabinet. Although not my bathroom, this is my childhood bathroom, as there is one shared shower. Next, my black sweatpants and long sleeve-stained John Mayer tour shirt from 2017 hit the blue tile.

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Sphinx

Shapeshifting has been a facet of nearly every human culture, explored in art and literature through the ages. These human-animal entities can be glorious and divine, or sinister and grotesque. Typically, they exist symbolically—either the transformation or the resulting state is significant in some way. My own experience with shapeshifting was more clinically than artistically rendered, and I am still hazy on the message my experience was meant to convey.

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A Month After Mother's Day

Dear Mom,

As you know, I’ve been wearing glasses since kindergarten. Even though Dad is always trying to get me to take them off for picture taking, you’ll see I’ve managed to keep them on in almost every photo. In my developmental years my glasses were a part of my identity. I was that girl with the ponytail and glasses. I revelled in being identifiable, as if my glasses gave me a reputation.

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