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We've all been harmed. Many of us have been harmed deeply, and had to go through a long, ugly healing process. Some of us are still carrying the injury around, tender to the touch. And then there's a harm on another scale entirely. Some people have been nearly wiped from the face of this earth. That's what happened to the Indigenous people of North America. Sit with that healing process for a second. Try to imagine its size. If you don't bring a wound into the sunlight, it fe

There's a photo of me that exists in the DMV's server somewhere. It's from a red light ticket, my first year of college, catching me zoning out, or honestly more like bed-rotting from behind the wheel. (The car was my dad's, which is why the ticket showed up at his house instead of mine.) I was headed to a Coldplay listening party at Tower Records, which would soon not exist, in a version of Los Angeles that would soon not exist either. "Yellow" had just come out. It was the

When we wade into the depths of illness, we can find times when we no longer recognize ourselves. Things have happened that I didn't choose, that don't feel like me in any meaningful way. That loss is immense. And I'd argue it's more than loss. It's trauma. Not a metaphor for trauma. Not "trauma adjacent." Trauma. Here's what happened for me: something traumatic occurred, and at the same time, I had trouble remembering it. Later, I had to reconstruct the events, piecing it to

A psych appointment is a job interview, mixed with a first date, sprinkled with a performance review. I already need the Xanax I'm here to ask for. Somehow you need to convince a total stranger that something is wrong. Not too wrong. Specifically wrong. Not vaguely wrong. But not so convincing that you end up on a grippy sock vacation, courtesy of the local psych hospital. This is a tightrope. Too little and you get dismissed. Too much and you get escorted. You also feel a de