Sep 15, 2021
My Radical Instagram Sangha: A Love Letter
A space has been created by this unflinching journalism, this unabashed Instagram memoir.
A space has been created by this unflinching journalism, this unabashed Instagram memoir.
I believed I had been nurtured, like a lamb, for one purpose: Mine was to be thin.
Each night, I faced my fear. Again and again, I went to bed.
I could only acknowledge my thyroid condition from sly, sideways angles—a hobbit stealing from a sleeping dragon’s hoard.
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.
My childhood rat tail was a lesson on the borders of class and gender.
There—the small red cut marks on the knuckles, which any bulimic could identify as those made by the teeth when finger-inducing vomiting.
Like Jazmine Sullivan’s “The Other Side,” a song from her latest EP, Heaux Tales, I saw a life outside the confines of conservatism—the length of my skirt and the policing of what I was allowed to say and do.
My former therapist, a well-meaning white woman, once asked me, “Do you think he treated you badly because you are Asian?”
Can you ever escape your complicity when you can't escape your own skin?
Science provides me with a vocabulary of illness, confirming what my body already knows: that it will never be the same
I was convinced that I could handle it all—including healing myself.
Nothing has gotten better—not the pandemic, not racism—but I know, and the Black women in my life tell me so, that everything will be alright.
During those first weeks, I was in a never-ending, often failing battle with Penny, then an eight-pound roly-poly of a beagle
This body is the home of both a female and a male self, and I am not yet sure how to help it accommodate all of me best.
I want to inhabit a form that doesn’t define me; I want to inhabit a form in a way that lets me define it.
Envy feels a lot like binging—the more you give into it, the worse you feel.
On a long-sought diagnosis, chronic pain, and a trek to Everest Base Camp.
