Adverse Childhood Experiences
Sometimes you lie so much you begin to believe what you say. Sometimes you don’t even have to say the lies out loud to believe them.
I was in the kind of love that puts a rock in your heart and stuffs your eyes with cotton, but you hold that rock and that cotton. Because that’s all you’ve got...
She says she’s got Borderline Personality Disorder. That’s like the worst thing you can have, worse than Bipolar. I feel better being around her because suddenl...
This is the place I remember—with its pine branches, hung like lace canopies. There is the rock slab where they took turns, each first pounding his chest, then ...
We are real people. We live in the aftermath of violence. We live with the consequences of too many guns and too few regulations. And the story doesn’t end the ...
Fear silences our voices and daily we convince ourselves that life is fixable, that it gets better and becomes whole again. But the fact is that it doesn’t, at ...
But I only knew the mechanics of sex, not its consequences. Who does at thirteen?
It’s got to be near three in the morning and my head still stirs with all the alcohol I had helped myself to. The alcohol I didn’t buy but paid for. Dearly.
TRIGGER WARNING: This #MeToo essay contains references to child sex trafficking and its effects on the writer. You will cry and, bit by bit, it will break your ...
Soon enough it’s clear he’s hellbent on spreading the rumor he fucked you—or is it fact? You’re a 13-year-old freshman who drank a pint of Southern Comfort, bla...
He was a lurker, an expert lurker, my grandfather. He lurked in the dark, and during the day he lurked in empty corners. My earliest memory is of him, sitting o...
It starts with blood. Mine. So red and stickysweet that my jean shorts catch to my chair in band class. This is womanhood spilling over, me tying a sweatshirt a...
"Diana could not be happy because her mother was a grizzly bear and Diana was a human and they could never understand each other. From the time she learned to s...
I left the seminary upon my conclusion that God was both a psychopath and a myth, and Christ had never existed. I saw no future for a priest who was an atheist.
My newly developed curves seemed to give me a dangerous power over my father and other men, which troubled me because I couldn’t seem to discern its appropriate...
My room was the base of operations for Dad’s drug dealing enterprise, a career he must have selected—I imagine in hindsight—to sustain his life as a musician
My mother took the greatest care of her porcelain Virgin Mary. She was two feet tall, dressed in white from head to toe, and as my mother claimed, cried when no...
The house had other guests too. They were invisible in daylight...
