On losing a pet, resilience and vulnerability, human frailty and animal intelligence, and everything that goes into saying goodbye.

“He gave me “the benefit of the doubt” that traffic was indeed too rough to allow me, a braless 25-year-old nervously driving a station wagon, to shift over.”

“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.”

Tinder is not a very good place for making friends.

“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. “

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.

“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.”

Dipping into my summer wardrobe for the first time reminded me just how far I’ve come in learning to love my body.

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.

“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.”

I got a taste of something I had never known — shopping in the men’s department afforded my body the opportunity to take up the amount of space it actually takes up.

“I didn’t even tell her when the notes started getting specific. Someone calling out my “crossed eyes” in a Tumblr ask. My “pocked skin” in an email. My “hillbilly teeth” on Twitter.”

“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.”

“Who are these men noticing me? Who are these men giving me the long, soft stare, eyes holding mine like they got something for me, something they can’t talk about, something only eyes can pass along. Who are these men whispering ‘hi, papi’ to me? I don’t think I look more male today than I did yesterday.”

We told some really incredible stories this year and you won’t want to miss a thing.

“That risks making a wound of my blackness. My blackness is not a wound; it is a gift I’m trying, consciously and earnestly, to understand and protect and witness.”

“Real human change requires space to be honest with yourself, honest with others; a space that doesn’t exist when you’re trapped by necessity behind a fortress of self-protection. As the inmate Poussey in Orange replies when a correctional officer pressures her to speak openly during a group therapy session: “Does it ever occur to you that actually feeling our feelings might make it impossible to survive in here?”

“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?”

“When I was thirteen years old I began starving myself. I did so, in short, because I wanted so desperately to be thin. And by thin, I mainly meant white.”

“We partied during the week and met up between classes, but brunch was where we let our queer identities free in a way that was more natural and less defensive compared to who we were in public.”