May 26, 2020
Playing Ophelia Helped Me Navigate My Own Grief
She sings and speaks in lewd riddles, mourning her father’s untimely death and her abandonment by Hamlet, her lover.
She sings and speaks in lewd riddles, mourning her father’s untimely death and her abandonment by Hamlet, her lover.
Though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I somehow knew that both relief and release were no longer optional. They were necessities.
I recall a 2016 headline that warned, ‘Orangutans face complete extinction within ten years.’ Nash will be thirteen in 2026.
I posed the question to her, earnestly, seriously: If given the choice, would she rather gain weight or would she rather die?
Obtaining a perfect grasp of masculinity was not my goal when I decided to transition, but I certainly did feel the pressure to try.
I do not believe in a soul but these past six months of illness, I am guilty of dislocating, of clinging to magic. Of wanting relief. Of being sick of being sick.
What I forgot, for years and years, were the details of what my body experienced at the time. But my body did not forget.
I learned that kind of hard-won glamour; that we should have beauty, however much the world wants to keep it from us.
I don’t recognize the future version of me the doctor describes. To remain myself, I must prove him wrong.
My relationship with food was a combination of deep love, reverence, and guilt—making it impossible for me to give it up.
The secret of the beauty of our bodies is slowly starting to get out, becoming less and less niche each day. And I hope it moves faster.
After you have a preemie, but before you get to take your baby home, the world keeps going without you. It’s shocking, honestly, how much the world keeps going.
It felt as though I had been evicted from my own body, and it had been trashed in my absence. My resentment was as precise as any recipe.
I felt a down spell in my persistent belief in possibility—a sense that something within me once felt unremitting, but had since been stretched to its limit.
Contrary to its reputation as an extreme sport, freediving has meditative aspects.
Dr. Couney settled in the United States in 1903, when he began exhibiting incubator babies on Coney Island every summer. “Infant Incubators With Living Babies,” the sign above the building read.
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.
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.
