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.
Darkness. 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.
Read MoreTaking the stage as a drag queen is ultimately what influenced me to dominate in the dungeon. Transformation, among many other facets, is what connects the two. However, I can positively say that I do not change as a person when I embody either archetype; I simply reveal parts of myself that are not always accessible.
Read More“You want me to put that where?” was my first response when my pelvic floor therapist handed me a three-inch piece of plastic connected to a cord, which she plugged into a computer. It was a sensor used to measure muscle strength that we were going to use to test out my vagina muscles. “Ohhhh…kay, well here goes nothing.”
Read MoreThe heavy wooden sailboat bobs aimlessly in the crystal coldness of the lake. Once again, the wind that propelled us down the lake two hours before has deserted us for our return trip.
Read MoreWhen I was a teenager, I learned from a Chinese calendar placemat in a restaurant that my birth year made me a rat. I was on a hot date in China Palace with Keith, my then-boyfriend-now-husband, and there it was, plain as day, on the placemat…I even moved the bottle of soy sauce to make sure I was reading it correctly and it was indeed clear: 1984, Rat.
Read MoreThat late-February day I checked me and the triplets into labor and delivery, it snowed six or seven inches, the world outside our room on the high-risk floor like a green screen, blank and full of possibility. Chad and I paid little attention to it—to its icy chill and constant shower of white—once we were inside the clinical ten-by-ten square room where we’d become parents.
Read MoreI grew up watching my mother and grandmother cook, internalizing how they yellowed the rice, when to taste the broth. I took their lessons with me to college, and charmed my first boyfriend with homemade chicken stews and lasagnas. When I turned twenty-five, the box of wonders in my head tipped over, spilling out erratic energy.
Read MoreWe leave behind our new house in America just as the weather turns cooler. An Airbnb on the Malvern Hills, a few miles from the city where I grew up, will be our base for the next three months. The bedroom faces a Victorian graveyard, the tombstones are cracked and sunken. Everything is covered in dead leaves and moss, the lives beneath forgotten.
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