Bent
Christopher Lloyd
I can barely look at myself in mirrors from the side or the back anymore. From the front, I am fine, sometimes even like what I see. I’ve taken shirtless photos, what queer man hasn’t? But as soon as I turn, offer a profile, I lose my nerve. I want to cry. Catching glimpses of it in the gym’s relentless mirrors makes my stomach flip. Suddenly everything shifts and my body is an alien landscape, a shape that I cannot quite feel when I am just moving around. Seeing is believing, in a way. My mirror image, my mirror-stage, is revived daily as a case of mistaken identity; this cannot be me, is not me, but must be, and as such is rejected.
It’s Never Just a Coat
Haley Fedor
The first time I shaved my head, I laughed and laughed with the joy of it. Before grad school, I was home for the summer and fed up with my long blonde locks, now in a multitude of braids, that would take forever to brush out. I remember standing over the sink, holding my father’s electric clippers and relishing their vibrating hum in my hand. My blonde-brown hair pooled under the leaky faucet, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I used the smallest clip and shaved my hair almost down to the scalp—right down to stubble.
My father simply gave me a look that said, ‘You have done something different, and it will be an issue in the house.’ That night, my mother stopped in the doorway of the dining room while the rest of us were eating. She looked at me for what felt like an eternity.
“I’m just wondering what happened to my beautiful little girl,”
In Which the Only Good Bird is a Lyre
Isabelle Quilty
Femininity was lithe, skinny. All things pretty and pink. To be dainty, fragile and submissive was to be a girl, defined by my mother. I was roughly hewn edges with dirt under my fingernails, messy hair and a tomboy at heart. Never overweight, but never dainty. No feline grace, but a boisterous child. I didn’t fit the outline she painted for me before I was born, and I never will.
At Home In The Kitchen
/The World Waits
Jen Schneider
The countertop remains busy. The engine idles. Bustling and bristling both habit and obligatory. Snoopy-themed mugs hug saucers with subtle chips while Linus sleeps. Oak table landings soak spilt milk and vanilla icing. REM wonders (stand in the place where you live). No rush for sleep or REM dreams. Orange Crush chills. An osprey circles above the skylight. I wonder if it’s hungry or if it’s a former resident checking on both legacy and longing. Blueberry banana bread bakes. The metaverse calls. Reception unable to collate. Lines both untraced and unanswered. Add dates, the youngest says of the batter. Or dried grapes. No spins on merry-go-rounds. Traffic stalls for miles. Within the kitchen’s walls, the world waits.
Reclamation
Stacey Harris
Your daily life becomes about planning for the baby. Everything you eat is for the baby. If you sleep on your back in the third trimester, the weight of the baby can compress an important blood vessel, cutting off circulation to your lower half and potentially killing you both. There is an enormous amount of pressure to do everything perfectly for this being that kicks you in the bladder and rearranges your organs on the regular, while your own personality fades into the background. You begin to feel empathy for the Mona Lisa — hanging on display in a temperature-controlled glass case, with no agency of her own.
Foggy Flâneur
Lilian McCarthy
Sebald finds it necessary, as I literally have done myself, to “assure [himself] of a reality [he] feared had vanished forever by looking out of that hospital window…and as dusk fell the wish became so strong that, contriving to slip over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on [his] belly and half sideways, and then to reach the wall on all fours [he] dragged [himself], despite the pain, up to the window sill.” He goes on to describe his physical appearance in this moment, writing “in the tortured posture of a creature that has raised itself erect for the first time I stood leaning against the glass.” How often have I done the same, absorbing the brief taste of the glass’ coolness on my aching forehead before my feverish flesh warms the spot of contact. I glimpse clouds passing, perhaps a bird, maybe even a car drive by, and it serves to reassure me, to some extent, that I did not imagine my life beyond the dark room where I find myself contained.
Theorectically Nihilist
Chloe Pingeon
When I was ten years old I would go skiing for two hours every morning and I would go to gymnastics practice for three hours every night and my nickname at school was toothpick because I was skinny and I was unequivocally confident that I was better than everyone else.
Tops
Avery Nguyen
I crush fifteen kilometres the way someone at a party crushes a can of seltzer into an unrecognizable heap of glittering, jagged metal. Cooling down, I jog the last few strides to my front door. My neighbor, one of the ones who keeps calling my roommates things like beautiful and impressive and “such a strong girl,” is standing on the porch. He looks at me. He makes conversation. I fumble my key in the lock.
The Way to a Man’s Heart
Ezra Woodger
To those with disordered eating habits, food serves two purposes. Food as fuel- an ugly necessity of human existence. Food as vice- eating is a weakness. A person becomes a slave to their body’s impulses. You’re going to give up true happiness just because you aren’t strong enough to say no. Of course, an eating disorder declines to mention that ‘true happiness’ will shift and move further from view the closer you come to achieving it, like a mirage in a desert. With enough discipline you’ll get there. ‘There’ is, in all truth, an illusion. Unless it’s a hospital bed. Or worse.
I Sing of Girls Loved by Gods
Adrienne Rozells
“Testa di Minerva” had no nose, no top lip, and no diadem to declare her godliness. Yet her hair swirled back from her face in perfect waves.
Her head tilted on a slender neck, looking at me with those smooth eyes, all iris, no pupil. I turned to find a small pixelated screen. Instrumental music underscored a woman carefully lasering discoloration off the goddess’s upper lip. With each blast of the laser a red dot appeared and a beep sounded and then all of a sudden what had been splotchy dark became marble white, as if the stone had never faded in the first place. I could feel Minerva watching over my shoulder. Another zap, and I felt it, my leg up on the kitchen counter with an at-home laser hair removal kit stinging my skin, making me sweat. The TV played in the background then too.
Under the goddess’s gaze, the art conservator (just a grad student according to the plaque) became an augur, burning sustenance so that the gods might feed on the smoke. Except in this case there was no meat, just rust being burned away by electromagnetic radiation, offering up the smell of burning ozone. I wondered what Minerva tasted. I thought I’d miss the meat, the blood and fat and bones.
Adult ADHD Diagnoses, and Why it’s Important to Talk About Them
Sophie Hulet
All I wanted to do was talk, and I was not very good at listening. I often got in trouble for talking when I wasn't supposed to in class. I had a difficult time making genuine friendships. I was aware that my emotional reactions seemed extreme compared to my peers, who I thought of as having an easy time 'staying calm,' and I didn't know why.
Sweat
Sol Kim Cowell
I lie in bed and I sweat for secrets. I sweat for the years I’ve spent hiding myself, being ashamed of my face and my voice and my body. I sweat for my father, who keeps himself in boxes, and my sister, who pours her stress into butter.
on escapism and various other drugs
nat raum
i worry, you know, about how much the past defines who i am today. i worry my body will always be too full of trauma to hold anything else. i worry my gender has become “traumatized” without me even realizing it. but who would want to be a man or a woman after linking so much violence to the idea of both? i’ve been beaten into womanhood by men. where does that leave a person who doesn’t find home in their body anymore? genderless, apparently. but we’re not talking about trauma right now. we’re talking about hash browns.
a complete family / hstry
Cavar
for years prior I had taken extreme measures to cease menstruation, and even before puberty, I feared and loathed pregnancy. I begged to get my tubes tied the moment I learned of the possibility, feeling existential terror at the sight of a rounded belly, a growth hijacking some innocent gut. This growth would then bear my name, doing with my legacy things I would be unable to control.
Erythema ab Igne:
A Prayer For Bodilessness
Robin Kinzer
I used to research every new diagnosis to the point of exhaustion. I have entire stacks of books on endometriosis, on Lyme Disease, on fibromyalgia, on chronic back pain. Have both the DSM-IV and the DSM-V, which I now find mostly useless, but used to page through during panic attacks. Calming myself with lists of symptoms, names of mental illnesses I’d never before heard. Now I dart between wanting to know nothing, and wanting to know everything. Sometimes when doctors try to explain this new disease to me, the medical terminology slimes briefly through my brain, and slimes right out again.
Large Format
Frances Bukovsky
The experience of photography and medicine is bound tightly together in my life. I make images of myself in hospitals, at home resting, before surgeries, after them, during treatments, on good days, on the worst days. I use test results in my photographic practice similarly, I imagine, to how doctors use them to puzzle over the nonsensical ways my body falls apart when it seemingly has little reason to. I create self portraits to return selfhood to my body when medicine objectifies it.
Lean In
Sterling-Elizabeth Arcadia
I wanted so badly for transition to fix me. I saw these other women whose lives seemed so beautiful. I wanted that beauty for myself. I believed that if my transition was not like theirs, that if my transition hadn’t fixed me, I might not be trans.
I Want a Doctor Who is a Photographer
Frances Bukovsky
At the end of the day, does it matter what language I’ve used for my eyesight? There is no quantifying my experience currently, no cure, not even tested treatments. Does it matter if my doctor is sympathetic or skeptical?
I know with the core of my being however, that it does. It is important to have a shared language in order to have common understanding. Within the words exchanged a condition becomes less a textbook definition and more a life altering experience