“I thought changing something on the outside would change the wrecked ruin of me on the inside. I thought somehow the inside would get a memo from my outside and get into shape. It didn’t, but my hair is the first way I was able to gain autonomy over my body.”
“I feel affinity for parts of Asian communities, neuerodivergent communities, queer communities and kink communities. I don’t really feel completely invested in one place. It’s always been like that.”
We all know self-care is important, but what does that actually mean? I talked to four experts in mental and social health care to find out more about the nuts and bolts of what self-care and community care look like for queer communities.
Fitting into Los Angeles wasn’t going to happen for me. Or so I thought, until I stopped trying.
The joke was that we had to have sex before the election, because if Donald Trump won, I never wanted to be touched again. It was a joke. A joke.
“Four-and-a-half minutes was all it took to throw me back into this huge river of feeling, and it was exhilarating and rewarding and made me feel light and warm in a place that had been cold and damp for a long time.”
“Even if I didn’t think I was hurting her feelings, she’s telling me I was. So what is my end game with my current strategy – make her feel badly for bringing up an emotional issue that she’s uncomfortable with? Make her feel like dirt for being honest with her own feelings?”
“With a strong intersectional focus, this is a zine about mental health for all people, in all walks of life. We believe that mental health care and support should be a right for all.”
I like to think I can control my anger, but I usually end up burning my own life down instead.
When the world feels dark, we have to find the light where we can and hold onto it. This is a story about a bright, shining spot of goodness: My Granny.
When waking up every morning feels like starting another steep climb, how do we keep our wits about us long enough to reach the top and breathe?
When the walls of my life seemed to be crumbling in on me from every angle, I knew someone would pay. That someone was usually me.
“Obamacare turned me from a liability into a full citizen worth protecting, and to see it roll backward instead of march forward would be a stain on our national history and an immediate threat to countless people.”
“It became a running joke between my partners and I, that I was both too stigmatized and too famous to get my needs met.”
I refuse to make a New Year’s resolution. I can’t buy into that idea anymore, because I know it only sets me up for failure.
How can one negative feeling send a whole day into disarray? Why do feelings like worthlessness seem to snowball? How do I stop this?
Why does an event like the election so profoundly affect marginalized people, while allies can almost avoid it?
Feelings about feelings: How do they work and why are they so awful?
When the election results came in, it had already been a month since I gave up on trying to fix my own mental health issues. And so it turned out that the worst day of our generation collided with my own personal low.
Hope is light, hope is all that is good, hope is what keeps humans alive when all other circumstances say they should be dead. So why was I so afraid of this life-giving feeling?