“Towards the end of the night you fall and tear the skin on your knee. But you pop back up and keep skating. You’re relieved. Now that you’ve fallen once you know you’ll be okay.”

While recovering from being cheated on, you’re honestly best off bingeing unscripted cooking series or documentaries about serial killers or just not watching TV at all and instead playing The Sims, where you can create your own fantastical world where nobody cheats and where if they do there are immediate consequences.

Bear with me here.

We published so much good work this year, and here is a fraction of it we think you will particularly enjoy reading back through!

A reader requested a roundtable where Autostraddle’s fat staff talk about how fatness, diet culture, and body positivity, relate to our queerness, identity, and gender. We aim to please, so here we are!

In the pool hall, my sweetheart and a close friend tease me one night: “unimpressive,” “pure luck,” “you aren’t that good.” They were trying to get my ire up so that an hour later when I told them to stare into each other’s eyes as I fucked my sweetheart’s body, I would mean it with a snarky competitive vengeance, I would mean it with power and control, I would be pushed to take what I want.

“I wanted to not care where I was going that/any day; a girl who’d interrupt her routine for a brush with honesty.”

I looked less and less like my mother— the image of womanhood I grew up with — and I was scared. Was she disappointed that I wasn’t like her? Did my femininity disappoint her? At the same time, I worried about being too masculine: people would know I wasn’t straight. I was angry: my mother taught me to be proud of who I was, but what if who I was becoming wasn’t good enough?

“I always went the extra mile for you and did so gladly because I loved being around you. You never returned these more concrete gestures, which should’ve been the first sign that things were not reciprocal between us, but I was oblivious and idealistic. I genuinely believed I had found love.”

The kind of miniseries that seems like a great idea when your fever is at its highest, truly.

Is it cold to ignore or avoid someone from your past when you cross paths? Maybe! Does it also often feel a whole lot better than engaging? Hell yeah!

The first time someone described Casey as having “stalkerish” tendencies, I defended her. For the most part though, I didn’t talk about it.

It’s 2017, and married power lesbians Jenny Schecter and Shane McCutcheon face some tough stuff only days before Carmen De La Pica Morales is coming in for a weekend visit that turns out a whole lot cooler than anybody could’ve predicted.

“I craved that isolation, that feeling of utter aching loneliness that I found inside houses where I did not belong.”

“I knew that somewhere along the way, I stopped being sober for her and had started doing it for me — and that realization hit me harder than my own fist.”

“For me, lesbian completely casts aside the idea of men. It puts me and the people I love ahead of the patriarchy. It relieves me of even pretending that I give a shit what any of them have ever thought. It thankfully gives me space to center women (and other people who aren’t men), which is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

Being able to be soft in this world is important for a lot of folks; but also, I think it’s a privilege. And when you exist in a world saying “women look like this” and you do not look like this (and maybe even aren’t a woman), it takes being hard in order to thrive. There is beauty in being hard that way. There is a reason we tell our lovers their haircuts make them look “sharp.”

“Apparently INFJs operate more off feeling, and I would say that intuition very much commands my brain/heart ship, so it’s an accurate assessment. How’d this bitch know that I’m soft-spoken though?”

Malinda Lo’s all-new short story about an inauguration protest that’s interrupted by an alien invasion is available exclusively on Autostraddle dot com!

I stopped hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2017 because of toxic masculinity and bro culture in the hiking community. It exists, it’s shitty, and it fucked me up.