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.
My friends and I share six-word memoirs, which are supposed to be a story in a nutshell. This was the one I wrote yesterday: “Naked, I paraded through the jimjilbang.” I sent this stingy, six-word sentence out to them with no further explanation. Let them wonder. But for you, I’ll flesh it out: I recently visited a Korean bathhouse, and here’s a crash course in all things jimjilbang.
Read MoreI married my ex-husband in the early ’90s, and despite being a feminist and a working professional, I took his name. It wasn’t a difficult decision. In fact, I don’t really remember it being a decision at all. We had decided to become a family and I wanted a single, family name to unite us and the children I expected we’d have.
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 MoreIt was early October when I updated my friend Kim about how I’d been spending my very single, mostly alone time in isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. “I’ve taken up watercolors. And also embroidery,” I said one night over FaceTime. Demure lady that she is, she covered her mouth and daintily laughed into her palm, the refined equivalent of a spit take, before regaining her composure.
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 MoreThere is an old saying that until you lose something, you don’t really appreciate it—even though there are things like a lousy friend, a cold, or a broken-down car that you might be glad to be rid of. Two of my favorite things were walking and hiking, things I lost the ability to do when I had a stroke nearly three years ago.
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.
Read MoreLate pregnancy is all-consuming. Every movement declares my impending motherhood. This child is always in the back of my mind, when he's not in the front. Everyone is asking when the baby will come, as if I know. They say I'm "about to pop," but I feel confident I will make it at least to Spring Break. My first was a week late, and this pregnancy has been like a rerun of the first, similar in almost every detail.
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