HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.
The amygdala assigns emotional significance to clutter I can’t throw away. To souvenirs and books throughout our house. To clawhammers, backpacks, yard signs we hang on pegboards. To ordinary places we visit again and again. This precious tiny thing deep inside my head also helps form shiny new memories. I want to hold on to my amygdala for a long time. Keep it healthy and functioning. Feed it. Maintain it. That sort of thing.
Read MoreOn the dock beneath a Wolcott summer house, you show me how to cast. I flick my wrist and it goes nowhere near as far as yours. By means of sarcasm we agree it’s not the most vegan thing to do. Later by the fire, you hear the splitter splatter in the water as I roast a marshmallow in the din of our friends’ chatter and guitar tunes.
“They are taunting me,” you say of the fish, “can you hear them?”
Read More“Why do you always play the same songs?” I’ve seen her iTunes library; there are hundreds of MP3s. The overplayed list explores grief beyond the Lilith fair trope. Some get mainstream airtime like “Drops of Jupiter” and “Meet Virginia,” others obscure, folksy lesbian coffee shop artists. She glances at me for a second before returning to her screen. “I’m making the soundtrack of us.”
Read MoreWords may not have the ability to slough through flesh like a knife or a sharp shard of glass, but they can be used as weapons of emotional destruction. For me, a married woman's worst nightmare came to fruition when my mother-in-law stated her feelings about me with painful clarity.
Read MoreHe thought I was sexy. Funny. Fun. Interesting. I assumed that growing up in Turkey and studying engineering hadn’t offered him much opportunity to meet lots of women. I felt a bit guilty—but mainly grateful—for that.
He was from a highly educated and sophisticated secular Muslim Turkish family; he’d come to the United States to earn his PhD from MIT. I’m a first-generation born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, American daughter of Orthodox-Jewish European Holocaust survivors on both sides.
Read MoreThere I was, doing an assignment for a Bootcamp on confidence, writing a vision of what my world would look like if I had unlimited confidence.
I set out to write a vision of myself as a successful author of an inspiring and hilarious memoir. Between that and my editing income, I’d be doing so well that I could afford to buy a space to build a creative retreat. But when I put my pen to paper—I wrote about love. And instead of feeling empowered, I couldn’t decide if I should roll my eyes, puke, or cry.
Read MoreWriting a memoir is being in the diaristic present. I’m here but writing about then—a then I have not documented, a then that is lost, a then I re-create with each stroke of a word, as if I’m a time traveler denied access to my past.
Read MoreHe’s never been there before, but my husband drives through Arizona like he’s a native. Our kids bicker in the backseat as he squints into the Southwestern sunshine.
The highway carves a groove into the hills. Forests of saguaro fade to arid plains. Endless interstate stretches through hours of tanned earth, unfurling at the feet of piney, snow-capped forests. Our rental car pushes higher and higher. We tug layers over jeans and t-shirts.
Read MoreBesides my husband, I have lived with no other being longer than Mullen. When we lived in Austin, after I suffered a miscarriage, my husband saw a pitiful ginger tabby kitten at an adoption fair. If we had any reservations, they were nullified when the adoption volunteer gave us Mullen’s history; his was the saddest tale in the shelter. A few weeks old, he had been found in a plastic bag, riddled with fleas and mange, cast away on the side of Mo-Pac.
Read MoreThe first playlist I made for someone came in the form of a mix CD that I’d burned on an old Dell desktop computer. It was a summer mix, meant to be played in my best friend’s pink Sony portable CD player as we skateboarded and biked down the backroads of our small Florida town.
Read MoreI see you,
with your dimpled smile,
your tubby legs,
your first stumbling steps,
a complete trust in the universe
that nothing will harm you,
even as your harried mother
calculates all potential risks.
Read More“A plane just crashed into the Twin Towers,” Sister Mary Frances said. Her eyes were wide, and she was breathing hard. She had just returned from dropping Sister Mary Michael at the Newark airport. “It’s terrorism,” she added.
Read MoreA sweetheart story is what I crave. The sweep-off-the-feet type that rides my heart into the
sunset with the faint letters rolling in the background. As innocent as prince charming, in
desperate search of their damsel in distress.
Read MoreDear Doctor S.,
I can’t believe I wake up each morning thinking about how much I love my husband, instead of engaging in the mental gymnastics of how to avoid him for yet another day.
Read MoreIt took me ages to feel confident about saying I was “in love” with my first boyfriend. I didn’t understand what the threshold was, where affection crossed from love to LOVE; I figured this was because I’d never been in love before. When I finally did tell him, I laced the profession with caveats, afraid to be put on the stand and accused of lying at some theoretical future breakup.
Read MoreI’m the only disabled person in my family. I was one of the very few visibly disabled people in high school, university, and later in the workplace. My experience of disability has always been characterised by comparison.
Read MoreLook at us, pretending to be normal, out to dinner on a weeknight, ordering the same beer like old friends. There was a food truck inside the restaurant and an exposed brick wall.
He took a bite from his dinner and washed it down with his beer.
Read MoreShe had skin like honey. Drizzled over each limb, down the nape of her neck. My own, in comparison, is pale; my back is scarred with past acne, my thighs raked with thin white stretch marks and dull, greying bruises. For her, the sunlight clung, in sheets of golden gossamer, to each of her limbs.
Read MoreI don’t miss him, but what I do miss is sitting on the cold sand of the beach in October, when the wind shivered my young bones, and I would huddle against him, burying my face into his cigarette, scented pullover. He would cross his arms for his own warmth, with a Marlboro Gold hanging from his blue lips. He never wore a jacket and even after all this time, this is the only way I can remember him.
Read Moren a childhood where my parents were always fighting, my escapes were the idealized versions of romance I saw in movies. The years leading up to their separation were filled with my frenzied consumption of the messages I received from Moulin Rouge (love is a many splendored thing!), Rodger & Hammerstein’s Cinderella (the far superior version with Whitney Houston and the most beautiful Prince Charming there ever was), and The Little Mermaid(who fell for a man she saw once).
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