How to Dismantle Your Imposter Syndrome One Episode of Murder She Wrote at a Time
Before Angela Lansbury told women they were partly to blame for sexual assault, she helped me with my imposter syndrome.
Before Angela Lansbury told women they were partly to blame for sexual assault, she helped me with my imposter syndrome.
“By the end of the 1994 Winter Olympics, I was 12 years old and quite certain I’d picked the right side.”
LGBTQ representation in literature is important. Also, chicken picatta is delicious.
I was a newly minted queer and everything I knew about queerness was rooted in coming out. I’d heard about the relief that came with coming out from everybody. If TV was to be believed, I would feel free even as my parents stopped looking me in the eye.
I can and will figure out a way to do everything by myself to keep from having to be nice to someone I don’t want to be nice to. I don’t want to be nice to a lot of people.
“There aren’t as many hairy, feminist lesbians as I was led to believe.”
As the daughter of lesbian mothers, I always knew I had a sperm donor, and that I could meet him when I was 18. I loved my moms; I loved my queer family. Still, I had always wondered what part of me was cut from a different cloth.
I changed. But it was a gradual process, in the way a forest becomes stone. Petrified forest of a body.
Depression is not forever because it always ends, and depression is forever because it always comes back. It won’t work if I only want to stay on the days when my brain breaks through the muck. Turn Out The Lights is a meditation on wanting to stay on the very worst days.
It’s a weird time of the year for many of us in the Western Hemisphere, especially with the warmer climates we’ve been experiencing later and later in the year for certainly no reason at all. It’s not quite time for a toasty beanie (and I, for one, have gotten pretty sick of only wearing dad […]
“Butch/Femme is important to me because butches and femmes writing and discussing what it meant to be who we are shaped my understanding of myself and how I can show up in the world.”
He pressed further, asking if I was an actress. I said something along the lines of “I hope so.” He suggested that I meet his brother as well – his producing partner. I remember him suggesting some place quieter, more private.
You shed your uterine lining every few weeks! Or maybe you suppress that shedding and call it day! Either way, we want to talk about how that’s going.
Stacy asked what she could do, how she could help, all she wanted to do was be useful, and I said nothing, nothing, I’ve got everything under control. And so she held me on the nights I was pretending to be able to sleep and whispered “I’ll take care of you” over and over without ever expecting an answer.
“I watched her zip up her white dress in the mirror; I watched her cross and uncross her legs; I watched her, and my friends watched her, and in the movie we were watching the other characters, men and women, watched her. I hated her so much, and so purely, with such satisfaction. I couldn’t look away.”
In general, my bi friends understand the alienation, erasure and self-doubt that comes with being bisexual in a “can’t you just pick one” world. By seeing and believing each other’s negative experiences, we help each other reduce the harm of those things.
“I’m done putting my faith in well-meaning surrogates. That’s not enough now, and it never really was.”
The women I kiss like to drink red wine, and I drink them in. I taste red wine and I move past it; my deliverance lies elsewhere.
Sometimes living with other people, even loved ones, can prevent you from doing the things your heart really wants — like being completely naked in your living room or kitchen, for example.
We all have periods of time in our lives when we find ourselves conforming to an identity or a style that isn’t quite… us.