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.
Like a dog guarding the small square of his front lawn, my father stalked and panted around the four corners of our kitchen. Rottweiler? Bulldog? Whatever he was, he’d caught my scent, and I couldn’t shake him. His breath—strong, moldering—was hot on my face.
Read MoreOn a cold February morning, driving solo through dense fog on a narrow potholed road from Amritsar, Panjab (the land of five rivers) in North India to a recently not-so-quiet hamlet of Dera Baba Nanak, umpteen thoughts clouded my mind.
Read MoreWeak Point
“Are you sure there’s nothing else you’re worried about?”
Secrets are like poison. Until you tell someone, they will kill you from the inside out. The worst secrets are the kind you keep from yourself—held at bay for so long until the dam finally breaks. For a week, I tell my mom that I’m having stomach problems, and it isn’t entirely a lie.
Read MoreIn the 1980s, I kept a blank cassette inside the tape deck of my radio, so if a song I loved came on, I could run over and simultaneously hit the “record” and “play” buttons, and add that song to the mix tape developing in its boom-box womb. The beginnings of the songs are cut off, and the DJ often started speaking before the fade-out was complete. But my collection of homemade tapes was priceless to me. And I thought I would be able to listen to them forever.
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 MorePeople say that to err is human and to forgive is divine. Some things can never be forgiven though. It’s time I stop trying. It’s time I let it go. There’s something I need to get off my chest, something that’s been suffocating me for too long. Eleven years ago I was raped and that just sucks, but even worse, that jerk never paid for it. I followed the rules. Sometimes following all the rules doesn’t see justice served.
Read MoreIt’s going on thirty-six years, yet I still argue with the thing. While walking in the neighborhood, I sketch out plans for a new beginning that will free me from the past. Or, say, I think that I will not think about it, but end up not fully admitting to consciousness the trauma surrounding what seems to have snowballed into its own life-form. A mass of pain is located in my lumbar spine—I know the discs leak fluid, though the last MRI showed bulges but no actual herniation.
Read MoreDarkness. Beside me, Phil, asleep, his breathing calm. Reassuring, though its very regularity reminds me of my piercing fear: Phil gone, the darkness utterly still. We are seventy and seventy-five respectively, him the older. I take not one of those breaths for granted. Yes: age, our happy marriage, the lateness of it. Having lost one beloved husband, having lost the life we had together, the life we thought we’d have, I feel and fear deep in myself another such catastrophe. Always.
Read MoreIt took me ages to feel confident about saying I was “in love” with my first boyfriend. I didn’t understand what the threshold was, where affection crossed from love to LOVE; I figured this was because I’d never been in love before. When I finally did tell him, I laced the profession with caveats, afraid to be put on the stand and accused of lying at some theoretical future breakup.
Read MoreMy favorite book by bell hooks is in my friend Kjersten’s house, I think. We’d spent a Friday afternoon in my kitchen with fellow mom friends, our circle’s version of Happy Hour, discussing love, grief, loss, and healing, our children tossing a football around outside. I mentioned my love for hooks and her writing on such topics, and Kjersten expressed interest. I told her hooks’ words changed how I approached my most meaningful relationships, helped me understand past communication breakdowns. hooks pushed me to embrace honesty and openness, to recognize love as a verb: “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it's a decision, it's a judgement, it's a promise.”
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 MoreWhile the steaming hot water pelts my tired skin, I think of the Mother Orca Tahlequah of the Southern Puget Sound Orca Tribe. For weeks she has carried the body of her dead baby on her back. I feel the twinge in my stomach, that awful twisted wrench of a feeling. I imagine myself crouched down in the water, resting on my knees, and crying it out. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to have love bring you to your knees, but my body can no longer go there. I don’t curl up in the right way anymore. My angles are off. I have no knees to fall to. Like Tahlequah, I must carry the grief upon my back. I must show it to the world.
Read MoreI step outside to enjoy the storm’s reprieve from the scorching August day. Suddenly, a wall of rain advances like an army, the wind its battle cry. Phone in hand, I start to video the drama, but when whole trees hurtle past me like javelins, I run inside and cower in the basement. It’s brief—five minutes, maybe ten. Then, chirping birds signal the army’s retreat and I slink upstairs. The first thing I notice is water streaming down the interior walls under the closed windows, sobbing to release their fear.
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 MoreEvery day we wait outside for a package we never ordered. I use it as a distraction. When I am upstairs finishing an email, an assignment, or another Zoom meeting, I anticipate the screeching: “Help! Stop It!”I know at the bottom of the steps I will find a familiar scene.
Read More“For now, all I want to say is that I’m extremely worried about you. And about Jamie. And I’m saying that because I love you.”
Read MoreLearning to say goodbye to my first car is also, at least for the moment, about saying goodbye to the city I grew up in and the people and experiences that shaped me.
Read MoreThe tires turned left into the driveway, just as my mind turned right. I never thought that I would have to pull up to another house, or rather facility, with luggage in the back of my car, ready to be unpacked into The Perfectly White Dresser. The Perfectly White Dresser recycled by dozens of girls with one thing in common: a parasite that has driven them far enough into misery that they must stay locked up in its drawers, subdued, away from the harmful society that is primarily to blame for their destructive race to perfection.
Read MoreNOLA Pride Week 2018 was my first large pride event, and I was determined to get comfortable with my androgynous aesthetic ideals. My partner and I planned to meet up with a few of our queer friends and ride the streetcar to the Quarter to attend a fem party at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. Getting dressed was an exhausting undertaking. I fought off a spell of dysphoria triggered by my depression weight loss.
Read MoreThe word quarantined—when I hear it, I can’t not think of you. You were confined to your room for two years because of your illness, waiting. First for a miracle. Then for my visits, which were never frequent enough. Finally, to die. When you tired of waiting for death, you made death happen, by refusing to eat or drink. You didn’t believe in a god or a heaven, which made this final act even braver.
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