How Perfume Gives Me Peace in My Genderfluidity
There is no opposite to reconcile. I’ve been both bride and groom, loved and lived as both, since both lived in me.
Dev Patel in ‘The Green Knight’ Helped Me Manage My OCD
Many times I could have said the same as Gawain, terrified in the face what was to come, “I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet.”
How Scent Returned My Life to Me
The raw stuff of life is only changed by the meanings we give it. Memory can be dissolved by scent, but also redeemed.
In Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, I Find the Women of My Family
For many people, they smell White Diamonds and, instantly, they melt. They remember their mother’s indulgent laugh; the arms that held them.
What Tarot Taught Me About the Stories We Tell
I’ve read that trauma disrupts time. That violent events are recorded differently in the brain.
In Discovering Perfume, I Discovered Who I Am
Before I transitioned, perfume was the only thing I felt safe to experiment with. It worked in the realm of the invisible, the as-yet-unsayable.
The Smell of Notre Dame Burning
This smell of Notre Dame burning was the smell of books older than all our lives—on fire.
When Chronic Pain Dulls My Senses, Perfume Helps Me Reclaim Them
I learned that kind of hard-won glamour; that we should have beauty, however much the world wants to keep it from us.
‘Camelot,’ the Hollywood Failure That Taught Me to Live Again
I think now, what is life if not a rather ridiculous, fumbling, histrionic, financially ruinous, unwieldy thing?