Sep 23, 2021
Embracing My Queerness in the Wake of Grief
I wondered how I would confront what I thought was my worst: my sexuality.
I wondered how I would confront what I thought was my worst: my sexuality.
When your brain is presented with a scenario, it makes a decision: Does it file this moment away as a unique event, or slot the information into an existing pattern?
It was an acrimonious divorce. I wanted justice. I settled for truth.
A space has been created by this unflinching journalism, this unabashed Instagram memoir.
Maybe it’s unnatural to talk to my grandparents about Partition like an anthropologist rather than a granddaughter.
I believed I had been nurtured, like a lamb, for one purpose: Mine was to be thin.
After her arrest, I started to understand. All the racist slights and foolish men my mother had endured. More reasons to be angry than I could count.
Nicole Froio on a gay Brazilian icon, the seminal show "Vai Que Cola," and living under Jair Bolsonaro's anti-queer regime
Each night, I faced my fear. Again and again, I went to bed.
In any serious picture of me, I am not comfortable enough to look directly into the lens. I don’t know if I will ever be.
Tiana Nobile, Ansley Moon, and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello chat about poetry, their experiences of being Asian American adoptees, and more
“Ahmed, eh,” says my Uber driver. “Quite a burden you carry, with a name like that.”
I find myself looking at the same memories with new eyes now that you’re gone.
I could only acknowledge my thyroid condition from sly, sideways angles—a hobbit stealing from a sleeping dragon’s hoard.
Squirrels are violent maters. I thought about that as metaphor, but I’ve already written that kind of essay, that story.
And does asking these questions make me a good mother?
Not-great tattoos remind you that you are a constantly evolving human—that your definitions of beauty and happiness may change form.
We’ve spent quarantine in faulty mirrors, sparking negative feedback loops.
I made a promise, too, that I would bring her back to you.
My childhood rat tail was a lesson on the borders of class and gender.
