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.
I.
It wasn’t cool to like the Backstreet Boys while attending high school in the late 1990s, and this may still be true today.
But I wasn’t cool. I didn’t care to get jiggy with it or weep to “Candle in the Wind.” The odes to drugs from Third Eye Blind and Marcy Playground were boring. I didn’t give any real shits about Lilith Fair’s tepid lineup, though I still went, quietly rolling my eyes through “Adia” by Sarah McLaughlin.
Read MoreRecently, scrolling through my news feed on Facebook, I came across a post by a girl from work. It was a picture of her and her mother side-by-side, same cute smile, same long, blonde hair, same eyes crinkled by their grins. She tagged it "#TWINS.” “Vote for me and my mom!" the caption said, with a link to a local radio station hosting a mother-daughter lookalike contest for Mother's Day.
Read MoreWhen I was five, I got a pair of Wonder Woman Underoos, stars on blue bottoms, a golden eagle on the camisole, which my dad called a wife-beater. I blasted around the yard, kicking Nazis, saving drippy Steve Trevor. The world had clean edges. I was a goddess, a force. Wham! Pow! Look out bad guys. My mom called me inside; I was just in my underwear, and what would the neighbors think.
Read MoreThere is a place
with waxing armpits on video in the kitchen
a room where a man plays computer games
and liked brunettes over blondes
Read MoreI lived in Pico Rivera when I was eight. I was among hundreds of Latinos that made up the majority of the population. We lived with my Mexican grandmother who grew weed in her garden for her arsenal of homemade medicines. Everything she had was homemade: her bras and underwear to her skirts, hand stitched with pockets added to them so she could carry her money and medicines around. Her brother lived in the shack besides ours, badly built by Mexicans with muddy pants and dirty work boots, placed in my grandmother’s back yard. We didn’t have a home of our own. I spent most of my childhood running around my grandmother’s garden and eating the dumpster dived food my great uncle would fish out of bins while my parents worked.
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