There is something freeing about being in a ballroom full of people singing about how we all deserve to feel a love that reverberates through the walls of our body.
The cruel logic of cancer therapy is that what kills the malignant could also kill the benign.
When we decided to immigrate to the US from Iran, I thought I was ready to face any possible hard times ahead—but there was still so much I had to learn about living.
There is an equivalence between fanfiction writers and readers: we’re in this together, united by our mutual passion for media.
To me, these never felt like steps to sprint through on the way to simulating life, but life itself.
It’s about being able to say, oh, gender? It’s no big deal. I just threw this gender on today.
The Outsiders’ world was the one in which I wanted to belong.
A white girl’s refusal to live by the dominant narrative gets to be glamorous, whereas I cannot imagine how a Black girl’s refusing the terms of society ever could be.
For all the meaningful internal changes I’d made since coming out, the city and space and circles I occupied were keeping me tethered.
When I moved to America, I thought I could fashion a new life out of the escape, but a BoJack Horseman character taught me to be patient with setbacks
I’m coming to terms with the fact that—whether it ends in an unfollow or in a blow-up bash in a house in Malibu—sometimes the kindest thing we can give one another is a goodbye.
I’ve found an unavoidable kinship with the Ducks. It could be, at least in my estimation, a quintessentially black American story.
We weren’t exactly rewriting our family traditions, but it felt good knowing that there was still a place for me in them.
In art, I was seeing the world. Yet, the entire time, I could not name a single Indian artist in my family’s homeland.
It both thrills me to watch myself as others might watch me in the world, and instills in me a deep loneliness—a grief that reminds me I am so helplessly stuck inside of myself.
As cliché as it’s become to say, I found myself needing this game in a way I could have never accounted for, even with all my years of fanboying.
I was a Black girl in the American suburbs, yet I believed The Beatles—and eventually, a dazzle of other white male musicians—were singing only for me. It wasn’t so.
My future was uncertain . . . A balloon dinosaur was tangible, even if it withered away in a week.
I pray my baby will love their body, or at least accept it, and carry it around the world, just as I have carried them too, with pride and joy.
