Adjusting your thumbs-up reaction emoji to match your real-life skin tone is a poor facsimile of in-person support and agreement, a Plato’s-cave gesture of a gesture. And yet. It was early April the first time I attended a Zoom event. In Oregon, we’d been shut in since March 23rd, and…

Everything happens for a reason, my mother says. It’s long been her refrain. She means it to take the sting out of a cancelled vacation, cake batter spilled on the floor, a relationship gone awry — but most importantly, she means it. For most of my life, I’ve been skeptical…

I performed thinness to win the acceptance of men, when all I needed was to accept myself — The first time I had sex with a girl was in the context of a threesome. I’d met the boy through a dating app, knowing he was polyamorous and partnered, and not an hour into our first date he told me he wanted to introduce us. Her name was Jamie…

The surgery would have actively harmed me, all for the pleasure of those who would look at me.

In the space of three days, I devoured Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath. I’ve been a voracious fan of her voice ever since I read The Empathy Exams, and was even more excited since the release was personally timely: I recently gave up drinking myself. …

I have just returned from a car dealership, where I was attempting to sell my Jeep the day before embarking on a three-month trip via a 16-hour travel day. That is, I was attempting to engage in a quick and professional transaction while fairly stressed out and under a time…

**2020 UPDATE** Hi folks reading this post. Thank you for being here. I honestly keep forgtting this story even exists, except for Medium’s emails telling me it still sees a small but steady stream of new reads each week. I just wanted to let you know that the mess I…