Results for: you need help
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Just Take It Bird By Bird: On Personal Writing
Writing about your own experiences, whether it’s through memoir or essay or slam poetry or leaving post-its about the sandwiches your mom used to make for your lunch on lampposts, can be empowering and life-changing, even without anyone else reading it.
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Let’s Pick Flowers, Save Flowers, Make Flower-Saving Books Together
Get ready to get sunny, crafty, and a little more adorable.
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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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How and Why I Wrote Bang!: A Masturbation Sex-Ed Book for Everyone
I made Bang! Masturbation for People of All Genders and Abilities because it profoundly made sense to me, because there was a gaping hole in that plastic wall where there should have been some acknowledgement of pleasure, consent, or the emotions of sex. Bang! was designed to fill this gap with emotionally-aware, positive sex-ed. While we had been taught about the vas deferens and fallopian tubes, we had never been taught how to even talk about sex with a partner. I made Bang! because I thought it needed to exist.
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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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Love Is Not a Lie: In Sickness and in Health
“Our wedding plans went on hold when I found myself unable to get out of bed.”
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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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I Can Masturbate, No Hands: On Innovative Masturbation and the Power of Friendship
“Through frank conversations with cross country mates and cheeky hints in coming-of-age films, I learned that masturbation is something people do to their vaginas with fingers, shower heads and (though I often doubted it) hairbrush handles. I intrinsically knew that what happened when I pressed my thighs together and held my breath was masturbation, too, but as my Encyclopedia of Wank expanded with no reflection of my own methods, it became clear that I was missing a fundamental element of jerking off.”
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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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I Have IBS and I Still Want You to Eat My Ass
“Do you think he’ll notice if I just never come out of the bathroom?”
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“Work in Progress” Is Too Much and So Am I
Throughout its eight episodes Work in Progress showed the value in being there for people even when it’s hard – and the importance of knowing when to walk away.
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The Price I Pay For(ever) My Culture
Being a first-gen, Indigenous, queer, Samoan girl in diaspora almost cost me my Samoan culture. But one day, I’m going to be the queer Samoan elder who looks my grandchildren in their faces, and says: I was afraid the entire time that I was fighting for the world you deserve, but I did it anyway.
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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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A Letter to My Ex on the Occasion of The Danish Girl’s 5th Anniversary
“People were always so impressed that you didn’t leave me, but your gift wasn’t staying — it was seeing. Most people don’t get to transition under the pansexual gaze of someone who loves them the way you loved me.”