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.
Imagination could only take me so far. I was ready to dance—and this time my mom couldn’t say no.
There is something about sex that feels like an unequivocal “fuck you” to death, taking something back from that which has taken something from you.
Still, I was in search of something more, something concrete, something material.
I've long been taught that the appearance of a good marriage, not a good marriage necessarily, is the ultimate goal.
They defined beauty. They defined womanhood. And they felt so, so far away from the woman I felt myself becoming.
Shame alley-ooped my fear. I worked with children and I had a mental illness. They were antithetical.
The creative release felt familiar. The soreness, the tenderness, making up new words for a new reality.
We were all looking for the exceptions; all of us. Our conversations about white people had by now become banal.
Whiteness cannot give us what we need, and this is not a disappointment. This is a testimony.
It was as if I needed a third surgery, a reconstruction. I needed the surgeon to rebuild what he tore out.
She sings and speaks in lewd riddles, mourning her father’s untimely death and her abandonment by Hamlet, her lover.
I wasn’t alone in this experience that had made me feel so isolated, so removed from everyone.
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.
Chineseness became a part of my heritage I could name but didn’t really understand.
It was never about exercise, nor changing my body. It was about doing something my body felt comfortable with.
The grounding I felt in organized religion was substantial: the loss, acutely painful. I found temporary relief in all the ways nature found me wherever I lived.
My future was uncertain . . . A balloon dinosaur was tangible, even if it withered away in a week.
