Results for: book
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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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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. -
Marching at the End of a Very Long Parade: On Being A Queer Alcoholic
I got sober alone, in a village about an hour north of Kampala, Uganda. I had moved there for a job opportunity, naively confident I, as an openly queer person with a mental illness, could flit across the globe like a moth. By the time I quit my job and scheduled an emergency move back to the United States, my drinking was threatening my life.
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Brown, Queer, Sad, Strange, and a Skilled Practitioner of Each
I found a different self slowly, learned to exist as if with many different goggles on at once. Always speaking from my mother’s kitchen in the Silicon Valley and, at the same time, my grandmother’s crowded living room in Punjab. In these years, I would feel the sharpness of many kinds of difference, marginalization. But when I looked down at myself for signs of why I felt so other, all I would find was the color of my hands.
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Feelings Rookie: Hopping Off the Plane at L.A.X. With a Dream and a Cardigan
Fitting into Los Angeles wasn’t going to happen for me. Or so I thought, until I stopped trying.
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I Never Meant for My Hair to Be the Way Back to the Lighthouse
“I thought changing something on the outside would change the wrecked ruin of me on the inside. I thought somehow the inside would get a memo from my outside and get into shape. It didn’t, but my hair is the first way I was able to gain autonomy over my body.”
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Feelings Rookie: How Teri Polo Made Me Cry in 4.5 Minutes
“Four-and-a-half minutes was all it took to throw me back into this huge river of feeling, and it was exhilarating and rewarding and made me feel light and warm in a place that had been cold and damp for a long time.”
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We’ll Have Sex Again, I Promise
The joke was that we had to have sex before the election, because if Donald Trump won, I never wanted to be touched again. It was a joke. A joke.
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Trump Won, So I Finally Got Out of Bed
When the election results came in, it had already been a month since I gave up on trying to fix my own mental health issues. And so it turned out that the worst day of our generation collided with my own personal low.
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Grandma’s House on Memory Lane
“As an adult, I wrestle with the stupid irony of having watched my grandmother live out her Alzheimer’s and not remembering anything about it.”
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Winter Is Coming: Diary of a SAD Girl #1
“Time Change Sunday is my personal gateway to hell. It gets dark earlier (and then earlier and earlier). It gets cold in the morning and night (and then stays cold all day and all day). I stay inside to keep warm and then I stay inside because I don’t want to leave and then I stay inside because I can’t get out of bed.”
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The Vagaries of Love: How Poetry and Queer Movements Give Each Other Names
For National Poetry Month, an ode to the queer poets who talk about their love, fight for justice, and helped me save myself.
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Some Things Are Impossible: How A Rural Queer Lives With Depression
“Farm work was everything my depressive body was screaming against: sunlight, physical activity, and tiny symbols of the fragility of life all around that I couldn’t remember how to value.”
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The Big Reveal
“In fact, the strain of hiding my illness would likely have caused me to break down with even more frequency. How would she have coped with those dysphoric, hallucination-ridden breakdowns — and how would I have dealt with her uneducated reactions?”
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Schecter 3:16 (Or How Jenny Schecter Saved My Life)
“I was angry. Really fucking angry. Angry because Jenny Schecter was right.”
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This Happens: Sexual Assault Between Queer Women
Poet Leah Horlick comes out about her search for healing and answers after surviving lesbian sexual assault.
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Dust to Dark: The Colors of My Craziness
“It’s on my twenty-fourth birthday that I realize something is wrong. I wake up crying and I don’t stop.”
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You Are Not Alone: On Being A Queer Survivor
“I called it sexual assault at first. Sexual assault seemed less damning, less permanent.”
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Going Mad in New York City
“I feel like yelling at people,” she told me. I didn’t really grasp then that she meant that. This was the very first time. This was the day after Easter.