Results for: you need help
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This One Time At Queer Writing Camp: All About the 2013 Lambda Literary Retreat
What I learned from a week on a hilltop with 50 queer writers.
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The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better)
Is a soft butch a soft butch if she can barely hold even herself together? Is a soft butch a soft butch without her swagger?
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I Don’t Want To Write Beautiful Things
I am in the business of writing honestly, especially about the things that hurt — heartbreak, disappointment, shame, poverty.
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Here’s What I Learned By Choosing to Step Away from Productivity For a Whole Day
I did nothing “productive” for a whole day: no email, no phone calls, no work, no cleaning, nothing that fuels my inherent Capricorn desire to win at Capitalism. Here’s what happened.
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Dispatches From My First Few Weeks in Florida
Everyone keeps telling me the correct way to outrun an alligator, but I keep forgetting. Also, everything about Disney World sounds made up.
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I’m Coming Out as an Anti-Zionist Jew
Going viral holding a sign that reads “My grandpa didn’t survive Auschwitz to bomb Gaza,” is not how I planned to start a conversation with my family condemning Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people. I’m not the only Jewish person who has long chosen to self-silence rather than stand with my values, but it’s not too late for other Jewish people to join me. The moment for Jewish-Palestinian solidarity is now.
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Seeing the Wind: How It Feels To Be A COVID Nurse
The first time I took care of COVID patients, I felt helpless. I’d lost access to my purpose, to my spiritual practice that lives within deeply connecting to my patients. I felt undeserving of human connection. I’d become a “dirty” nurse.
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Wild, Fat, Queer and Black: How I Became Free In The Mountains And Never Left
If you have ever met a mountain, you know that can’t nobody really own a mountain because they are too majestic, too strong, too beautiful to be tamed or owned. So I guess mountains are kinda like Black folk.
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The Illusion Of Safety
I don’t want to be caught parading around in last generation’s false sense of security. I’m kicking off Autostraddle’s first Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) Heritage month by exploring the values my own South Asian and Japanese American parents and grandparents imparted to me, to learn to carry them forward.
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How To Write A Spell Against White Supremacy
To me, magic means resilience and connecting to ancestors who survived the tragedy of the Middle Passage. Magic runs through my veins and feels like my birthright. It’s stronger than white supremacy will ever be.
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Giving Poppers to Cis Women
“A cultural exchange from a person with a prostate to those without.”
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Haunting of Hill House’s Spooky Lesbian Empath Helped Me Understand My Own Ghosts
“I have enough of my own grief, I don’t need yours, too.”
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Courting Loneliness
It was like saving a seat on the bus for someone who routinely happened to never show up. It was like setting the table for someone who decided to eat an hour before coming over for dinner.
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How to Quit Smoking
Tell yourself that you’re not like one of those chain smokers, that you can stop whenever you want. Start smoking American Spirits, so it’s like, not even that bad for you because it’s natural, or organic, or something. You forget.
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Bipolar Disorder, Trans Dykes, and Celestial Catastrophe
One patient in the study “Observation of Trends in Manic-Depressive Psychosis” by O. Spurgeon English recounted that living with bipolar disorder “is like opening all my pores on a cold day and subjecting myself to catastrophe.”
I too have felt like a catastrophe of a person, a catastrophe of a star, a catastrophe of emotions. -
From Willow to Waverly: A Decade of Being Out and Me and Queer TV
“I remember little moments so vividly — like Ashley kissing Spencer on the shoulder while they looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. This is what I wanted. And I wasn’t afraid of wanting it anymore.”
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“Transparent” Changed Me (And TV) Forever
“Do you have something to tell us?” my mom joked. It was a joke, because of course I didn’t. “No,” I said with a laugh. And I thought I was telling the truth.
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Prone to Wander
“Selfishly, I’m worried about what will happen if I say out loud that I’m uncomfortable with all this God, if I let my brain run its anxious course. If my atheist, queer, bipolar self comes to choir with me in all its unkempt glory, will I lose my safest place?”
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How I Claimed Being Thirsty as a Personal Lifestyle and Learned to Live My Dreams
The more I allowed myself to want, the more I realized I wanted. The more I leaned in to my desires, the clearer they became.
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You Don’t Always Transition Once
Transitioning is stigmatized as betraying our assigned gender. Sometimes, though, it takes two betrayals to get where we need to be.