The story of how I joined theatre is like if the Disney Channel was dark and gay.

On specific language, families, mispronunciations, and revisiting Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake.”

I am ready to be fearless. To dream beyond Black womanhood and know that I — Black, queer, and not-quite-sure — am worthy, so worthy of all of the love, affirmation, and power the universe can muster.

When I read Middlesex, I felt that tinge of recognition I think a lot of queer and trans people look for when they realize something is different about themselves.

My summer hookup with a rich businesswoman in Japan gave me something more valuable than even the room service wagyu steak.

“It’s taken me five years, but the feeling of joy, freedom, excitement, and fulfillment that I feel when I can dance to bachata with my queer kin, when I don’t have to choose between being Latinx or being queer, when I can honor all of my identities at once, is worth risking my safety.”

While the Hanged One asks us to wait quietly instead of pushing hard, to surrender to the experience instead of fighting against what we cannot control, this is also a chance to understand what drives us, fulfills us, inspires us. What are you dreaming of? What has become more important to you, and what have you realized isn’t worth your energy?

Even one-night-stands have a spirit to them, but I wasn’t willing to confront that until I stopped drinking. When I did, I was finally able to place my mind right within my body, to touch and be touched without fear. Having sober sex was a way for me to unravel the contempt I felt around my body and my sexuality.

When I told my partner I thought I needed to call the ER for a telemedicine appointment, her face was devastated but not shocked. We’d been listing off symptoms to each other for weeks — dry throats, tight chests, nausea — trying to decide if what we were experiencing was anxiety or the onset of the virus.

There is a different level of intimacy and affirmation that I have found when having sex with other fat people. Thin people approach the fat body like a series of insecurities. They see the swell of a stomach or rolls of fat on the back and assume that you hate those parts of your body. When another fat person touches me, it is to be made whole.

What do Courtney Love and Greta Thunberg have in common? They both speak their minds, distrust power, and they’re both autistic. These two vanguards show us the power and political potential of autism while demonstrating how autistic people can shape a fairer and kinder world.

Maybe, she finds herself thinking, there could be space for joy in this new life. Maybe, she dreams, as she finishes the last page and immediately starts the book over again, this is not so hopeless after all.

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.

“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.

Watching them sweat from my spa on the sidelines, I’d thank my body. On the one hand, so humiliating; on the other, its own defense mechanism against the wretchedness of exercise.

That’s what friendships with queer and trans Christians have taught me: it is blessed indeed to want more, more of everything, more love and more gender and more faith and more life.

I was only pregnant for seven and a half weeks before my miscarriage. There was no body, no breath; there was no measurable part of a lifetime spent together. I’d only known there was life inside my body for three and half weeks, and yet the experience seems to still have a heartbeat.

“As soon as we met Tara and Tony, our lives morphed to make room for them. Instead of drinking Carol’s parents’ liquor on Friday nights, we went to their apartment in Hillcrest to smoke pot from a bong filled with Midori and play with Tara’s snake.”

“There’s an easily accessible narrative in wilderness travel, to pretend we’re living outside of society, and to strive to create a better version of it. The temptation to argue that “x doesn’t really matter out here” rears its head in all of the usual places: race, socioeconomics, gender, age. What I’ve come to struggle with in the canoe, and years later, is which way to go. To continue my first argument, to dismantle gender, or to teach gender – to teach what it means to be a strong, dirty woman, to ask my co-instructor to teach positive masculinity.”

“I had two stuffed animal bear friends as a child. Pretty tight crew, I know, but two bears was enough as I also had an imaginary friend who was an adult woman that I had to entertain. I was only one child!”