Arts & Culture
Finding My Mother—and Me—in the Women of ‘Girl, Interrupted’
Living with mental illness is a constant cycle of wellness and illness, and each recovery is impermanent.
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.
How Learning to Dress Myself Helped Me Understand My Trans Identity
There’s a part of me that is overwhelmed by the possibilities, by the fact that I finally look the way I used to only imagine I might.
How My Community Showed Me I Could Be Both Muslim and Queer
“It was this Islam, the Islam of authenticity, community, justice, and love, that showed me how to be a truer version of myself.”
How My Grandmother Took Me from Dollar Store to Dior
Gramsie wasn’t being a snob. Or, she wasn’t just being a snob. She was trying to school me.
What an Over-the-Top, Teen Cable Drama Taught Me About My Sexuality
I didn’t know—or think I knew—any visibly queer women, and watching these fictional women half-existing seemed both comforting and lonely.
Why Your Grandma’s Housecoat is the Perfect Work-From-Home Outfit
We fall prey to letting writing become a passion, cooking a hobby, teaching a service. We must rethink how we value labor.
Wearing Wigs Gave Me Freedom From the Shame of Mental Illness
And then there were the wigs: exercises in risk-taking, rejections of my boring and shame-consumed past self.
In Defense of the Low Bar: An Ode to Everclear
Kurt Cobain would not approve, but privately I wondered if there wasn’t space for a beloved burnished thing in my new and improved pop pantheon.
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‘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?