“In the two weeks I’ve been on the road I’ve learned to be silent and reverent in the face of nature, to see myself in mountains and peel away the layers that tug me toward them, to feel at home in endless waves of grain, to become someone new in every new place.”
I went to Tennessee and found freedom and a sense of adventure. And the best keychain ever.
Tinder is not a very good place for making friends.
“I remember everything: what normal felt like all through college in my relationship with her — an attractive and charismatic woman who was also a compulsive liar and an abusive lover. Of course it didn’t start out that way. Insane realities rarely do.”
I went to New Jersey and back, and I had a million billion emotions.
This week I will pack up my (brand new!) car, and I will probably cry, a lot, and I will put some stuff in the mail, and I will take a million photos, and I will drive across the country.
Sometimes the only way to remember the good times is to recreate them yourself.
I don’t know how to make friends, but I’m going to try. I’m going to do it with apps and technology, so that the process is replicable for the rest of you.
In the very first edition of a biweekly column all about tacos, Yvonne writes about her personal connection to the delicious, Mexican super food and her search for damn good tacos far away from home.
“It isn’t until the summer, when the frost melts and the icee man comes calling and the pool is open and the yard (however ridden with stubborn weeds) starts to incubate natural life, that you realize the source of your woes isn’t dependent on the weather. It’s you. “
“The threat to move to Michigan was always made in a specific context: some element of my life fell apart and I didn’t know how to fix it or myself.”
This year, from April 20th until June 12th, I made some variation of “no” my Facebook status every day. It was just something I found vaguely funny but by the end it was something that I could count on for strength.
“Now more than ever, I think it’s important to say alabanza to those who were slain, to lift their names up in prayer and to remind those of us still living that Black lives do matter — they’ve always mattered and will always matter.”
Once you figure out what feeling you were chasing, you can start working toward it – and getting a solid taste of it — every day. And that, my friend, seriously changes everything.
It’s as if I had just discovered a new color and now had this entirely new dimension to my life. I was able to paint a holistic portrait of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like.
Dipping into my summer wardrobe for the first time reminded me just how far I’ve come in learning to love my body.
“Not all of my experiences as an intersex person inform my being gay, and vice versa, but the overlap is there and it affects things in ways that are both good and complicated at a time in history when homophobia and intersexphobia are alive and kicking.”
Sometimes, even the best laid plans are, well, decimated. Even a type-A mega control freak like me couldn’t control my own body when I was pregnant — and I certainly couldn’t control what happened to my son after his premature birth.
“Despite all the planning, and all the talking, and all the money we had spent, it was THAT moment that suddenly made the wedding feel very real. This was the dress I was going to get married in, that I would be wearing when I affirmed my desire to spend the rest of my life with my amazing partner. But, it also touched something deeper, more complex, more fundamental to my transition and my womanhood.”
“Dating broken white women became a way to reprise a powerlessness that years of sexual abuse and generations of blackphobia had tricked me into believing in. I drowned this feeling of powerlessness in weed and seeking out relationships in which I could engage in yet remain completely hidden from view.”