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.
Each 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 MoreMay 27, 2020
“You need to understand, if something happens, if the worst happens, we cannot let you inside,” Dr. Waters says through her mask, looking up into my face. Her eyes are beautifully made up, achieving a doe-eye effect. I wonder, momentarily, if she is in love with someone in her office. Her gloved hand reaches towards my dog. “With COVID, no one but staff is allowed inside the clinic.”
Read MoreThe trees are a riot of color as I drive past the grounds of the Episcopal Church in my town. The field that becomes the annual pumpkin patch worthy of inclusion in a Peanuts special is heartbreakingly bare. Every fall since I moved to this New England town over twenty years ago, the arrival of the pumpkins has been a seasonal passage.
Read MoreAt first I didn’t even realize you were there. You sprung up seemingly overnight, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was thirteen, my body already changing in all kinds of ways.
Read MoreDear Doctor S.,
I can’t believe I wake up each morning thinking about how much I love my husband, instead of engaging in the mental gymnastics of how to avoid him for yet another day.
Read MoreBy my eighteenth birthday, I was convinced my entire personality was a mistake. My hobbies were hipster and obnoxious, tied to the fine arts and human culture. My goals were lofty and idealistic, invoking a life of novelty and meaning. I hated that I cared for these things despite their presumed futility in our modern (read: capitalist) world. The trendy albeit psychologically debunked Myers-Briggs Type Indicator had assigned me a personality with one of the lowest average incomes, followed by fun phrases like “most likely to have trouble in school,” and to me, this was the surest confirmation of my worthlessness.
Read MoreIt is not true today that my children are in school learning about ratios and raising hands. It is not true that my husband is at work teaching teachers about equity in education. It is not true that my dog is sleeping with her nose on her thigh alone in a quiet home. It is true that I go to work as always, but it is not true that my day as a doctor unfolds with its predictable rhythm.
Read More“So you’re the matriarch,” the bartender says as I join my daughter and granddaughter at the bar for a sunset drink.
Read MoreI don’t know what I was thinking when I packed the frying pan. As I dashed around the apartment that December afternoon, I packed several random items along with sentimental ones: a cluster of hangers; a photo album; my bikini and wool dress coat; a framed print I liked; the blanket my grandmother had given me when I was three years old; a yellow umbrella; my favorite coffee mug; and the heavy frying pan.
Read MoreW. Atlee Burpee & Company says it’s sold more seed in 2020 than any other time in its 144-year history. A month into seclusion, a Honey Gold potato in a basket on my kitchen counter began to sprout. The eyes grew thick, leafy lashes. What to do? There’s little room in my diminutive yard to cultivate any type of vegetation.
Read MoreLike 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.”
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