Category: Essays and Reviews
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Post-Scraps from the Edge
After 2020, I started to use Instagram more as a kind of public scrapbook. It wasn’t just about sharing photos—it was about writing the captions to contextualize them, using writing to process my thoughts like I always had. Sometimes I knew what I was working through. Sometimes I didn’t. It felt necessary, as a means…
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How about titling it “Conversing with the Digital Void: A Raw Dialogue”?
That’s personally not what I would have chosen but… I don’t know about you but I fall down a meta-cognitive rabbit hole whenever I write now, no matter what I’m writing. After the below stream-of-consciousness-turned-convo-with-ChatGPT1, I now know this includes digital journal writing—wherein I start in earnest with self-exploration and veer into commodifying my existential…
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A fat TV character can’t exist without implicit bias (yet)
Because nothing is created in a vacuum. Have you watched Baby Reindeer yet? I wasn’t going to. I watched the trailer and thought it best to avoid it. But the buzz got the best of me, and I watched an episode. I won’t be finishing it but I have some thoughts.
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Welcome to CA
I’ve been in California a couple months now, and it’s been an unbelievably slow acclimation. It’s not something I understand consciously—I can’t point to anything that’s been “wrong.” I just knew I didn’t feel right yet and that I had to be patient with myself.
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Reflections on “doing the work”
Today was my last session with Laura, the amazing therapist I’ve been working with since 2015. We knew that we went as far as we could go together. I have new hills to climb, and I may need a new partner to help me get there. (More specifically, I want to focus on my recovery…
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Old grief in the time of covid
My mom died on March 24, 1998, just 6 weeks after she turned 35. On March 13 of this year, I turned one day older than my mom when she died. (A while back, Meaghan found an online calculator and figured it out for me so I could celebrate my day of freedom.) From that…
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A Nice Lady
My grandma turns 89 today. I can’t call her because she won’t remember me so I remember her instead. I leaned in, talking to her like nothing had changed (because for me, nothing had). I showed her old photos of herself. In one photo of my pregnant mom, she asked who it was. “That’s your…
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The 1989 Production of WTWTA
Did I ever tell you guys the story of when I was in a stage production of Where the Wild Things Are? That’s how I know it will be a good movie, because it was so brilliant on stage. My Broadway (St. Paul the Apostle auditorium) debut:
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Making a Pillowcase from the Upholstery
You can’t go home again and all that stuff. An essay about getting rid of the childhood possessions that weighed me down.
whyareyouyelling.com 