Sep 23, 2021
Embracing My Queerness in the Wake of Grief
I wondered how I would confront what I thought was my worst: my sexuality.
I wondered how I would confront what I thought was my worst: my sexuality.
It was an acrimonious divorce. I wanted justice. I settled for truth.
In any serious picture of me, I am not comfortable enough to look directly into the lens. I don’t know if I will ever be.
Promiti Islam on queerness, Bengali-American identity, and the complexities of family acceptance,
I wondered: Who was I when I first formed this friendship?
I didn’t want it to make sense—to send my children away for who knows how long—but I did need them to survive. I needed to survive.
Distance, though it may be physically distancing, need not make a couple grow distant.
For a decade I’d tricked myself into believing I was happily married, never thinking there could come a time when the trick no longer worked.
I discovered breakdancing in that VHS time capsule, and that was as close as I’d ever get to a culture that did not exist where I lived.
Nora Feely on loss during the pandemic, chosen families, and the small but devastating things 2020 took away.
I was already in love with all my friends. But in my newfound singleness, I was falling in love with them more deeply.
I've long been taught that the appearance of a good marriage, not a good marriage necessarily, is the ultimate goal.
We were all looking for the exceptions; all of us. Our conversations about white people had by now become banal.
I wasn’t alone in this experience that had made me feel so isolated, so removed from everyone.
"Juice" had the type of lyrics that forced me out of my solitude, whether I wanted to be out of it or not.
Sharing clothes feels like sharing a secret, the same way being someone’s child does.
It goes like this: sit with the thought, don’t move your fingers, arms, legs, let it enter you, let it stay, let it leave.
Navigating the burdens of expectation as a married woman in Nigeria
Natural disasters have a terrible way of reminding us of our capacity for kindness, acting like a yardstick for our collective empathy or apathy.
