On Houses, Ghosts, and “Good Bones”
When we moved out of our house, I wondered: How much of our presence is still there? How much do we haunt the place?
When we moved out of our house, I wondered: How much of our presence is still there? How much do we haunt the place?
Transition needn’t be a straight line.
Each time I used my credit card, I rationalized my ballooning debt by imagining a future in which I was satisfied with my transition.
I’ve actually been masking long before the Covid pandemic.
Whenever I’ve found someone passed out in a bathroom as a bartender, it’s because they’ve well exceeded their personal limit with alcohol. I also can’t help but think it’s because there’s been too little of something else.
What I didn’t say was how much of home each of those packs brought with them.
When you love someone with dissociative identity disorder, you are not building one healthy relationship—you are building many.
Anyone who has lost and subsequently gained weight back can tell you that you will be treated differently in real, material ways. The difference is at once alluring and painful.
In other words, the suburbs are equated with whiteness because they were designed to be.
I found it freeing: to accept—instead of fear—gravity, to savor that brief float before the fall.
I want medicine to meet me where I am, not where it wants me to be.
BIPOC kids can be the heroes, the fighters who push back against impossible odds. We, too, should be the stuff of legends and prophecies.
As a queer person, I’d had no role models growing up, had to stumble through every relationship, learning how to love as best I could. Dog fostering was a kind of parallel crash course.
In our constrained culture where public, raw grief is not socially acceptable, I fear that grief stories are being asked to do too much.
Here is my official statement on why I do most things alone: I am a lone wolf. I am comfortable with myself. Here is another explanation: There is something about me that is fundamentally unlikeable.
I believe so strongly in the beauty and autonomy of body transformation, but I’m worried that will erase the small visible echoes of my (and my mother’s) history of survival.
In the time since being an active Tumblr user, I’ve seen our cultural standards for what is “desirable” shift so much.
I needed her to tell me that it was okay to doubt, to yearn, for the lyrics in our headphones to mean something sacred—with or without God.
I’m embracing the label, with all its yearning, try-hard connotations, because desire shouldn’t be embarrassing and love does require trying hard.
Will it challenge how they feel about the kingdom? The nationalistic pride of what it means to be Thai?