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.
Dead asleep on my bed—helpless and susceptible to the dangers of the night—a bright flash of harsh light slices open my eyes to two strange faces.
The two faces command, “Wake up!”
I hear in the background my mother’s whimpering voice and then my father’s weathered voice.
Read MorePencils, three, sharpened. Done. Pens, three, filled with blue ink. Done. Writing board with clamp set ready. Done. Water bottle filled. Done. Hair oiled and tightly plaited. Done. Dressed into a comfortable salwar-kurta. Done. Eat? If, and only if, there were idlis. Soft, piping hot idlis with coconut chutney.
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 MoreOne of the fascinating things to me about human sexuality is how it is pretty much imprinted on us at birth. Our choices that define the spectrum of our sexuality are set long before we have any idea of what sex or sexuality mean.
Read MoreIn the Bluebeard fairy tale, which enjoys variants across time and cultures, a boorish, rich, and mysterious man with a bluish countenance woos and takes several wives. After each whirlwind courtship and marriage, the new wife is given a key with which to breach a forbidden room. She’s instructed not to, but does so anyway, and discovers carnage; the bodies of Bluebeard’s previous wives whom he has beheaded, chopped to pieces, and/or hung from rafters or hooks.
Read MoreMy birthday is December 30, five days after Jesus’s and one day before New Year’s Eve. It is the perfect day to be born if, like me, you prefer your birthday slide by unnoticed. I never had to bring any classroom cupcakes. Not a single black streamer hung from my office door on my fortieth, which suited me just fine.
Read MoreWords may not have the ability to slough through flesh like a knife or a sharp shard of glass, but they can be used as weapons of emotional destruction. For me, a married woman's worst nightmare came to fruition when my mother-in-law stated her feelings about me with painful clarity.
Read MoreSana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.
My mother and I, along with my children, have come to visit my Tía Eva. She is my mom’s tía, my great aunt, but I have only known her as Tía. It is what I told my children to call her, as well. Just as her name hasn’t changed, neither has her house. Even though I haven’t seen her in years, I walk the same cement steps leading up from the side of the house into the wood panel living room cluttered with memorabilia. Sit on the same floral upholstered settee sofa amid the photos and porcelain figures (myriad bells and keepsake boxes), crochet doilies like the crosshatch sugar crust of conchas, on the various coffee and end tables.
Read MoreGod, or kismet, or intuition, or chance, wakes me up. My cell phone’s home screen lights up my bedroom. I reach for it. My news app notifies me that there is an ACTIVE SHOOTER targeting NED PEPPER’S BAR in the OREGON DISTRICT of DAYTON OHIO. The alert was originally sent fifteen minutes ago. I immediately dial Brianne’s number, one of three numbers I’ve committed to memory. I need to know if my friend is oh please I can’t even think it.
Read MoreI don’t exactly regret it, but still I carry shame about it.
As my tween peers began sprouting breasts, my chest remained boyish, leading to taunts and rejections from those despicable beings known as 13-year-old boys. When my breasts eventually emerged, albeit reluctantly, they never grew to a socially acceptable size. Fitting room ladies repeatedly proffered bras with generously padded cups, conveying without subtlety the message that my barely AA breasts were insufficient as they were.
Read MoreIt should be illegal to have floppy hair as an eighteen-year-old boy and own a guitar. It can be a violent combination to gaze upon when you’re a girl—add to that a pair of scuffed-up Converses? Forget it, you’re dead on sight. This vision was served up to me like dessert at dusk one day while sitting on the roof of a car, and my life was just about ruined.
Read MoreIt is the wettest, coldest winter you can have without the gift of any snow. We slog through one rainy day after another. My husband is working late, and I know I will crash into bed before he gets home. That means that only conversations I will have today are with people who call me “mom.” I am swallowed up in momming. As I trudge upstairs with another bowl of cereal, and a towel to clean up the first bowl my son knocked over in anger that it was “too milky”, I recall a time when I didn’t feel like a mom at all.
Read MoreHe thought I was sexy. Funny. Fun. Interesting. I assumed that growing up in Turkey and studying engineering hadn’t offered him much opportunity to meet lots of women. I felt a bit guilty—but mainly grateful—for that.
He was from a highly educated and sophisticated secular Muslim Turkish family; he’d come to the United States to earn his PhD from MIT. I’m a first-generation born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, American daughter of Orthodox-Jewish European Holocaust survivors on both sides.
Read MoreIn my cupboard I have eighteen cans of jalapeno peppers that cost 11 cents each. There were twenty, but I have eaten two in the last year. I bought them because they were 11 cents each, you see. You never know when you might need jalapenos. I bought the twenty cans of mushrooms at the same time for the same price, but those I ate. Most of them, anyway.
Read MoreThere I was, doing an assignment for a Bootcamp on confidence, writing a vision of what my world would look like if I had unlimited confidence.
I set out to write a vision of myself as a successful author of an inspiring and hilarious memoir. Between that and my editing income, I’d be doing so well that I could afford to buy a space to build a creative retreat. But when I put my pen to paper—I wrote about love. And instead of feeling empowered, I couldn’t decide if I should roll my eyes, puke, or cry.
Read MoreMy twelve-year-old son is conducting research, interviewing as many people as he can at the Hugo’s Supermarket downtown. He’s on a mission and there’s no stopping him. His statistical analysis involves the following variables: person, car driven, and favorite soda. I’m not sure which is the dependent variable, but I’m sure he’ll correlate vehicles with soda type soon. Maybe make a discovery he can sell to Pepsi. That’s his favorite one, after all.
Read MoreFinn arrives in what is unmistakably his truck, a Toyota pickup smothered in bumper stickers: “Keep Your Laws Off My Body!” “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” “No Coal Exports!” A plastic Buddha rides on the hood, a compass of sorts to guide Finn through hazy adventures. He steps onto the driveway wearing a faded Grateful Dead t-shirt and flashes me a peace sign when I greet him.
Read MoreI finally got pregnant after four rounds of insemination, three rounds of egg retrieval, and three rounds of embryo transfer. Some people who do IVF take pictures of all the needles it took to get them to baby.
Read MoreAt the age of fifteen, during the second semester of my sophomore year in high school, I cut off my hair—as close as I could to the roots—and started wearing my brother’s clothes. I wasn’t trying to be a boy; I was trying to un-girl myself.
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