#personal-narrative

#personal-narrative

Our marriage of more than 18 months was refused entry on arrival, left on the tarmac at Dublin Airport, because same-sex marriage wasn't legal in Australia.

"On the map, I kept to the blue highways. At night, I slept in a tent. I thought of myself as an apprentice Kerouac."

I turned to see an air-conditioner that had tumbled from a window several stories up on the sidewalk just on the other side of my building's front door.

As a kid, I learned to do handstands from my dad;... but also in perspective. This innate curiosity... remains evident throughout her book On Muscle.

"A burn layer puts a mark on a timeline. There is a before, and there is an after, and there is no mistaking the one for the other."

My breasts were real, and they were spectacular...a double mastectomy gives you license to say breast over and over again...without the usual consequences.

I moved around a lot, seven schools, four cities over ten years, so I heard every possible version of my name.

Troy and I got engaged one month before I received a terminal diagnosis. We had talked about marriage over the years but had our reasons for delay.

I was 15 years old when a friend and I got a job picking mushrooms at a mushroom farm. We were picked up at 6:00 a.m. from a local plaza and driven to the farm two hours away. Somehow, we were separated and put in different grow rooms (which felt more like horse stalls). There were no windows nor electricity for light. There were eight 'pickers' per room; only two wore headlamps. It was so dark I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. We were told we could take our first break in two hours, and then the door was shut tightly. I did my job quietly, feeling around the manure for mushrooms in complete darkness amongst six strange men. It felt like eight hours had passed when the door finally opened two hours later.

"People-pleasing has a bad artistic reputation-it's more common to imagine serious artists driven by an uncompromising inner vision-but he made a poetics of it."

In a time of experiencing a profound loss of control in the form of the tumor that was blurring my vision, this felt like a consummate act of taking back my life, or at least my story.

While spending four hours in an excruciating administrative meeting trying to protect student journalism at KU, I opened my phone... and then I saw it. Nick Pivetta, after declining Boston's qualifying offer and then having his market stall like most everyone else this offseason, had signed a contract for the 2025 season.

The initial vision of turning a disused cow pasture into a cherished garden evolved over the years into a lush, self-sustaining forest ecosystem.

The house just is an idea of a house, or the aftermath of a house; you can walk through the arched door at the front and the back.