“People really want to fit Native people into a box, in this safe stereotype space. I defy every single stereotype anyone has ever held about Native people. I enjoy breaking those stereotypes, completely smashing them.”
I felt humiliated singing a song about honor when I could only feel shame. As I stood in yellowface, I had finally fulfilled my quest to become white.
I just wanted to believe my eyes were magic, that only I could see things that existed below the surface.
I don’t want my self-worth to hinge on a relationship. But vulnerability is a practice, and for me, it has been a valuable one.
My dyscalculia turns counting a difficult task. So, to get to know them, I turned numbers into people.
Weight loss is not a life change that just happens with a snap of one’s fingers. There’s more to it than that, even when people say it’s just about “putting in the work.”
This is the problem with the vocabulary of miracles when it comes to childbearing: It ends up equating failure of conception or birth with a divine curse.
As a child of many cultures, I wasn’t sure I could lay claim to one. But I learned that identity can grow and stretch, widen and encompass more than a single country or language.
Most of my formative adolescent experiences took place in churches, but it was never about god. What drove me was a feverish desire to belong.
These worlds I dearly love, with science-fiction that supersedes the science in our reality, deserve Smart Drives and automatic doors and disabled heroes, too.
The beauty industry right now is run by dinosaurs. What’s in these things we put on our bodies?
My father was missing. How could I put him back in the picture?
“The books are my brothers,” Fruznik says, in one of his turns of phrase that sound seamlessly romantic. “They are not lifeless things. They are living.”
I relate to what Springsteen sings because he reveals much of the American Dream as an intoxicating illusion.
Our mothers wanted to protect us. So they hid us, beat us for having opinions, for being too inquisitive in a world that doesn’t permit girls to be curious about things.
Whether it’s postponing motherhood or dreams of the perfect dog, the most painful steps to living the life you want are often the most necessary.
Whenever something goes wrong at the New Amsterdam Theatre, it’s because of Olive Thomas. But the people working there don’t mind; they say, “Technically, she was here first.”
When my grandfather threatened to kill himself, I began to wonder if, as he sees it, he has effectively stopped living.
We’d denounce the marches and torches and chants. When that moment passed, we’d continue to live with the ghosts of our country’s peculiar legacy.
