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.
The amygdala assigns emotional significance to clutter I can’t throw away. To souvenirs and books throughout our house. To clawhammers, backpacks, yard signs we hang on pegboards. To ordinary places we visit again and again. This precious tiny thing deep inside my head also helps form shiny new memories. I want to hold on to my amygdala for a long time. Keep it healthy and functioning. Feed it. Maintain it. That sort of thing.
Read MoreMaybe you saw her serving champagne on a one-for-you, one-for-me basis at a big nun party, shooting corks for children to catch. Later, you’d bond that one summer week watching science fiction movies in the novitiate basement. You’d be thrilled when she came to live in your same convent. It would make sense, the life-sized poster of Spock in her bedroom, just down the hall from yours.
Read MoreWe broke up on a Thursday in a foreign country where I only spoke a disjointed version of the language. In a charming little restaurant, he sat across the table from me, reached for my hand, told me he loved me, but…I guess the rest doesn’t really matter. He was back on the dating apps two days later. It’s such a disorienting thing to feel your entire world implode, to watch dreams of a life together disappear into thin air. I questioned if they had ever been within reach at all. They weren’t, but I didn’t know that yet.
Read MoreIt was a perfect August day, and the Wolf River was clear and cool. The leaf canopy of spruce and cottonwood sparkled overhead, like shards of brilliant green glass backlit by intermittent bursts of sunlight.
Dave and I were trying out the twin red kayaks that his kids had given us the previous Christmas. Everyone agreed we had been working too hard, and the weight of a business we could no longer save was taking its toll.
Read MoreI didn’t want to meet Tim at first. I’d just been burned badly by a man who said we were exclusive, and then I found out he was dating around six women at the same time. I’d gone back on the dating apps more as an act of rebellion, an action to prove to myself that my horrible experience with Jeff wasn’t going to define my experience with dating and love. But I was leery. Oh, how I was leery.
Read MoreOn the dock beneath a Wolcott summer house, you show me how to cast. I flick my wrist and it goes nowhere near as far as yours. By means of sarcasm we agree it’s not the most vegan thing to do. Later by the fire, you hear the splitter splatter in the water as I roast a marshmallow in the din of our friends’ chatter and guitar tunes.
“They are taunting me,” you say of the fish, “can you hear them?”
Read More“Why do you always play the same songs?” I’ve seen her iTunes library; there are hundreds of MP3s. The overplayed list explores grief beyond the Lilith fair trope. Some get mainstream airtime like “Drops of Jupiter” and “Meet Virginia,” others obscure, folksy lesbian coffee shop artists. She glances at me for a second before returning to her screen. “I’m making the soundtrack of us.”
Read MoreI’m the only disabled person in my family. I was one of the very few visibly disabled people in high school, university, and later in the workplace. My experience of disability has always been characterised by comparison.
Read MoreA warm-hearted pack rat through and through, I knew she probably hadn’t donated the boxes in my former bedroom, nicknamed the hobbit hole. (Much like Paul was the Walrus, I am the Hobbit.) Crammed with what I kindly labeled childhood trauma — lighten the truth with a little humor, no? — the boxes held SAT prep books and enough plaid uniform skirts to choke not only the horse, but the whole Kentucky Derby.
Read MoreIt’s day thirteen of my Coronavirus quarantine, I got up at eleven, drank two mug fulls of espresso, and I’m sitting in my childhood room in Montecchio, Italy, writing in a little black notebook, blank except for a handful of pages. The notes are a few years old and they are all about him—they are embarrassingly titled “My You”—but most importantly they are about her, the girl who was me, the girl who didn’t think she would survive heartbreak, humiliation and abandonment.
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