What The F Issue 27

University of Michigan

Issue 27

december 2023

What the f Your irregular periodical

Stella Fiorini Co-President Makayla Kelley Co-President Claire Gallagher Editor-In-Chief Tess Beiter Assistant Editor Morgan Butler Assistant Editor Dimitra Colovos Staff Writer Claire Emch Staff Writer Eliza Phares Staff Writer Ruhi Gulati Staff Writer Isabel Hopson Staff Writer Anna Nachazel Staff Writer Isabella Oh Staff Writer Hanna Young Staff Writer Sara Wong Staff Writer Stella Moore Art Director Leah Ankutse Staff Artist Adelina Akhmetshina Staff Artist Ava Berkwits Staff Artist Lucy Bernstein Staff Artist Maria D’Ambrosio Staff Artist Sivan Ellman Staff Artist Catherine Hwang Staff Artist Lila MacKinnon Staff Artist Maevis Rosengart Staff Artist Yuchen Wo Staff Artist Lydia Naser Layout Co-Director Elizabeth Wolfe Layout Co-Director Emma Christopherson Layout Staff Katherine Hurley Layout Staff Diya Mahaveer Layout Staff Gabriella Mazal Layout Staff Megan White Layout Staff Nia Saxon Social Media Director Nicolette Bennett Social Media Staff Fiona Henne Social Media Staff Dylan Wade Social Media Staff

Aayana Anand Podblog Co-Director Payton Aper Podblog Co-Director Tahlia Davis Podblog Staff Shelby Jenkins Podblog Staff Makayla Kelley Podblog Staff Grace Martin Podblog Staff Sonal Sharma Podblog Staff Suhani Suneja Podblog Staff Grace Fisher Events Co-Director Adriana Kelley Events Co- Director Aine Beale Events Staff Natalie Nedziwe Events Staff Rhea Sridhara Events Staff Sana Hashmi Marketing Director Logan Brown Marketing Staff Mary Corey Marketing Staff Ella Larsen Education Co-Director Mia Staggs Education Co-Director Autumn Drake Education Staff Faith Johnson Education Staff Arya Kamat Education Staff Becca Rolling Education Staff

What the F is a non-partisan, non-profit publication operated

by students at the University of Michigan. What the F’s purpose is to encourage discussion on significant issues of campus, national, and world interest. The magazine, the executive board, and our sponsors do not endorse the ideas presented by the writers. We do, however, support and encourage different ideas in our community and in campus discussion.

What the Table of Contents 1 2 5 8 11 12 16 18 21 22 24 26 28 31 32 36 38 41

Letter From the Editor Shit I’m Afraid to Tell My Doctor: Your Vagina Has Got You Covered When Grandma Pays For Your Groceries this is a rebellion against my own brain Praying to a Patronizing Priestess The Threads of a Soul The Girl in the Mirror My Ghosts Searching for Divine Signs Controlling the Cave We Don’t Belong Here Fixing My Disorder Didn’t Fix Me The Script We Follow: Addressing Abuse in Competitive Robotics Gauze for an Open Wound The Walls of the Room That My Brain Rests In Within Your Intuition starving myself straight You Should Probably Leave

Letter from

the Welcome to What The F, your feminist periodical!

Dear Reader, I’m writing this letter to you on the Friday before Halloween. It’s an unusually warm weekend for this time of year, and I’m feeling a heightened sense of gratitude for my friends and my communities on campus. Yesterday, I lay on my roommate’s bed and watched while she and all of our other roommates milled around the bedroom, swapping costumes and stories from the day.

I felt so at home that it hurt. In my senior year, it’s become a common experience, recognizing and cataloging objects and places and sounds and people that feel unmistakably like home, everything I might miss after graduation. This magazine is one of those things.

For our 27th issue, the writing team voted to center pieces around the theme: “The Writing Is On The Wall” (thank you to lovely co-president Mak for the idea). We discussed ideas of omens and signs, gut feelings and the end of the world, and ended up with a wonderfully unique set of pieces. In this issue, our writers invite you to explore personal narratives, poetry, and short fiction on vaginal health, relationships with food, abuse in the world of robotics, collage art, the complexity of grief, and more. I hope you’ll be able to see yourself in these pages, to feel a sense of connection through shared experiences or sentiments or beliefs. I hope you’ll feel at home.

But, if not, I hope you’ll be able to feel the tenderness behind every word.

As always, we’re happy you’re here.

Love,

Claire Gallagher Editor-In-Chief

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TO TELL MY DOCTOR:

SHIT I’M AFRAID

your vagina has got you covered

By Claire Emch

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Your vagina does not want your help, believe it or not.

There can be a lot of pressure to make your vagina smell a certain way. Maybe you’ve watched TikToks about drinking a gallon of pineapple juice or trying a Summer’s Eve “freshening” spray before heading over and getting it on (sorry I’m like 50 years old). Contrary to popular myths about vaginas, your vagina is not a gift basket of fruit and flowers and it doesn’t have to smell like one. With how we talk about maintaining it, it’s easy to forget that the vagina is an organ in the body. I’ve never once thought about making my gallbladder smell nice or washing my esophagus.

Your vagina can help create life, feel sexual pleasure, and enables you to have a healthy menstrual cycle while regulating your hormones; why are we expecting it to smell like we bought it from a store?

Quick Terms Just in case you forgot everything you learned in health class like I did.

Your vulva is the “outside.” It includes the clitoris, the labia, the opening to your vagina, and the urinary opening.

Your vagina is the “inside.” It is the canal that connects the vulva to the uterus (“What are the parts of the female sexual anatomy,” n.d.).

What is Douching? Douching is the process

of “cleaning” out your vagina with water or other products marketed as “hygiene” products. They usually come in a bottle that you can insert into your vagina, squeeze to release whatever substance is in it, and it basically rinses your vagina out (“Douching,” 2022).

Your Vagina Actually Self Cleans!

Your vagina does not want you to spend money on something it already does! With mucus, it can wash out blood, semen, and vaginal discharge so there’s no need to douche after your period or hetero sex (“Douching,” 2022).

It’s okay and even good to wash the vulva, but not the vagina. It’s best to wash your vulva with warm water and unscented soap, from front to back to stop the spread of bacteria from the anus to the vagina. Experts say that soap is not entirely necessary, since even mild soaps can cause irritation of the vulva, but do what feels right for your body. Be careful not to get any soap inside your vagina (“Is it safe to douche while pregnant?,” 2022).

Why is Douching/Steaming/Wipes/ Sprays bad? Douching is NOT healthy for you or your

vagina. Douching can mess up the delicate balance that your vagina has already cultivated to help you stay healthy. Most medical professionals and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend against douching (“Is it safe,” 2022). Products close to douching, like feminine wipes, are also discouraged by experts. There are typically chemicals and parabens in these items that can be harmful to your vagina (“Intimate Wipes: How a little wipe does more harm than good,” n.d.).

Vaginal steaming, another “hygiene” practice, attempts to do a similar thing. It involves squatting over a pot of boiling herb water so that the fragrant steam can waft into your vagina. This has been practiced for hundreds of years, dating back to the Ancient Greek times, and is said to detoxify the uterus, increase fertility, and have the bonus of making your vagina smell like the herbs added to the pot. However, there is little scientific evidence that steaming actually affects your health in a positive way. In fact, it might be harmful. There’s a slight chance you might slip from your squatting or sitting position and burn the delicate skin that makes up your vulva and the areas around it. Additionally, putting any non-prescribed substance up your vagina, whether it be steam, a douching product, or a spray, always has the risk of harming it (“What is Vaginal Steaming and Is it Safe?,” 2022).

The consensus is that trying to make your vagina smell better or make it more “hygienic” is not worth risking your health. The vagina has a very delicate balance of pH levels and microbiome that should not be messed with (“Douching,” 2022).

What does pH have to do with my vagina? pH, the one from 7th grade science class, is an

acid-base scale from 1-14, where 1-6 is acidic, 7 is neutral, and 8-14 is basic. We have all kinds of different pH levels in our body that help it function correctly. For example, our blood is neutral, but a tad basic: it’s about 7.35 to 7.45. This allows proper exchange of materials and keeps you healthy. If your blood were to become acidic, or less than 7.35, then you could go into acidosis, which could be extremely bad for your health.

However, in your vagina, there is a pH of 3.8 to 4.5, which is acidic. This allows for good bacteria to be able to live in your vagina and stop other fungi like yeast from infecting you (“Vaginal pH Balance: Understanding Intimate Health,” 2014).

Bacteria in your vagina? Yes, there are

bacteria in your vagina. But not the kind that makes you sick.

There are actually bacteria all throughout your body that do different jobs for you. In your gut, you have bacteria that break down food that we don’t produce enzymes for, like lactose if you’re lactose intolerant. In your vagina, there are bacteria called lactobacilli that work to keep your vagina healthy and clean.

However, there are also “bad” bacteria called anaerobes that live there as well. In a healthy vagina, there are more lactobacilli that live there than anaerobes. When we do something to upset that dynamic, like douche, the anaerobe population could overtake the lactobacilli and cause bacterial vaginosis (Mayo Clinic Staff, 2023).

What can good bacteria do for you?

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Can Stop Bacterial Infections: Lactobacilli can stop

anaerobes (bad bacteria) from over-colonizing your vagina, which allows the bacteria to stay balanced between “good” and “bad.”

Can Block STIs: Lactobacilli can reduce the risk of contracting STIs because they produce lactic acid. Lactic acid can kill other “bad’ bacteria and viruses like HIV.

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Can Help Fertility: Lactobacilli prevents your vagina from becoming inflamed. Inflammation can lead to complications such as difficulty conceiving and premature birth (Witkin et. al, 2017).

Can Help Prevent Cancer: Lactobacilli can actually inhibit cancer cells from developing into tumors and stop cervical cancer before it develops (Yang et. al, 2018).

What happens if there are more bad bacteria than good? Bacterial vaginosis is a

bacterial infection that can happen when anaerobes take over the vagina. This could happen due to douching, changing sex partners, or just a natural lack of the “good” bacteria in your vagina. Symptoms can include thin vaginal discharge, “fishy” vaginal odor, vaginal itching, and a burning sensation when peeing. However, you could have bacterial vaginosis without any of these symptoms.

You might be thinking that these symptoms sound a lot like a yeast infection, but yeast infections and bacterial vaginosis differ in that yeast infections are fungal and are treated with antifungals, whereas bacterial vaginosis is a bacterial infection and is treated with antibiotics. If you think you have a yeast infection, get the medicine for it, and if it still doesn’t go away, you might have bacterial vaginosis.

Speaking of treatment, sometimes BV can clear up on its own.

But you might still want to go to a doctor, especially if it’s not clearing up after 2 weeks. BV can lead to a higher risk of contracting an STI and problems with fertility and birth. These complications are rare, but it’s still important to be aware of them (Mayo Clinic Staff, 2023).

Gummies Probiotics can come as pills or gummies that

promise better gut health, better vaginal health, basically, better health in any part of your body that has a bunch of bacteria living in it. While probiotics can improve gut health, there is little solid research on if probiotics actually affect vaginal health.

Most experts in the field agree that there isn’t any reason to take these probiotics unless you are experiencing recurring bacterial vaginosis (Bilodeau, 2019).

Vaginal Suppositories I never knew this was a thing before researching and am just blown away by the obsession with putting things up the vagina. In this case though, I might not be such a downer, and say this might actually be good! Vaginal suppositories or boric acid suppositories are solid medications that can be inserted via an applicator into your vagina. Since boric acid is toxic when taken via the mouth, it is necessary to take it this way. It is a safe way to treat reoccurring vaginal issues like yeast infections and is even prescribed by OBGYNs across the country (“Boric Acid vaginal suppository,” n.d.).

Now, I’m about a downer again, because as helpful as vaginal suppositories are, they should not be used for vaginal odor, discomfort, or vaginal dryness. A popular trend started on TikTok claims vaginal suppositories are a safe way to eliminate odor. In reality, there is no scientific evidence that vaginal suppositories can fulfill this promise, and medical professionals argue that, if taken without being prescribed, vaginal suppositories can cause infections (Garrard, 2022).

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In Your Vagina, We Trust At the end of the day, there really isn’t anything you need to buy to have a healthy vagina. Chances are, your vagina is doing just fine on its own.

It doesn’t need any sprays, douching, or fancy soaps—these products might actually hurt it. Vaginal odor is normal and even a sign you have a healthy microbiome. It’s obviously easier said than done, but there’s no reason to worry or feel embarrassed about how your vagina smells. It just means it’s doing its job.

Works Cited 1. What are the parts of the female sexual anatomy? (n.d.) Planned Parenthood. https:// www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/health-and-wellness/sexual-and-reproductive-anatomy/ what-are-parts-female-sexual-anatomy 2. Douching. (December 29, 2022). Office on Women’s Health. https://www.womenshealth. gov/a-z-topics/douching#:~:text=What%20is%20douching%3F,in%20a%20bottle%20or%20 bag 3. Is it safe to douche during pregnancy? (March 2022). The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. https://www.acog.org/womens-health/expertsand-stories/ask-acog/is-it-safe-to-douche-during-pregnancy#:~:text=Do%20not%20 douche%2C%20whether%20you,may%20have%20a%20mild%20odor 4. Intimate Wipes: How a little wipe does more harm than good. (n.d.) Women’s Voices for the Earth. https://womensvoices.org/feminine-wipes-health-environment-concerns/ 5. What is Vaginal Steaming and Is it Safe? (April 19, 2022). Cleveland Clinic. https:// health.clevelandclinic.org/vaginal-steaming/ 6. Vaginal PH Balance: Understanding Intimate Health. (October 23, 2014). Intimina. https://www.intimina.com/blog/vaginal-ph-importance/ 7. Mayo Clinic Staff. (June 10, 2023). Bacterial Vaginosis. Mayo Clinic. https:// www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/bacterial-vaginosis/symptoms-causes/syc20352279#:~:text=Balanced%20vaginal%20flora%20help%20keep,the%20flora%2C%20 causing%20bacterial%20vaginosis 8. Yang, X., Da, M., Zhang, W., Qi, Q., Zhang, C., & Han, S. (2018). Role of Lactobacillus in cervical cancer. Cancer management and research, 10, 1219–1229. https://doi. org/10.2147/CMAR.S165228 9. Witkin, SS, Linhares, IM. (2017). Why do lactobacilli dominate the human vaginal microbiota? BJOG 124: 606–611. https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/14710528.14390 10. Kelly Bilodeau. (December 27, 2019). Should you use probiotics for your vagina?

Harvard Health Publishing. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/should-you-useprobiotics-for-your-vagina-2019122718592 11. Boric Acid vaginal suppository. (n.d.) Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/ health/drugs/19641-boric-acid-vaginal-suppository 12. Cathy Garrard. (September 6, 2022). Boric Acid Suppositories: Why Doctors Advise Against Use for Vaginal Odor or Discomfort. Everyday Health. https://www.everydayhealth. com/sexual-health/boric-acid-suppositories-doctors-advise-against-use-for-vaginal-odor/

By Sara Wong

When Grandma Pays For Your Groceries

She doesn’t say anything about the pregnancy test, but she does sift through and comment on the remaining contents of your bags. Beef shank, good cut. Pears? Not juicy enough, can’t you tell? Aiyah. Then, she smacks you on the arm and points at the box of Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, scolding, you only got one box? Two for one deal! Eat more, so skinny, you need to eat more!

You lock eyes with the cashier, a stocky man with an unkempt beard, and contemplate asking if he sees her too. Your grandma, that is, the one you’ve never met. You will never meet her because she is dead. $48.46, Miss, he says, only at you. You hate when people call you Miss. You’re twenty years old. You live on your own. You have a job. You ace your classes. You cook for yourself and pack lunches for your boyfriend. You don’t even live together, but you always go the distance for him. Like today, when you told him you were worried, when you told him you were nauseous and your period never came, and he called you irresponsible and demanded you buy a test, you still made him fried rice.

What if it’s positive, you said under the mocking morning sun, catastrophizing.

Then you just get an abortion, he said.

Can’t we talk about this?

You’re too young to have a baby. There’s nothing else to talk about.

Your boyfriend never said you were too young when he first bought you a drink at the bar, though his eyes widened when you told him you were still in college. You act so old for your age, he’d smiled. You laughed.

The Hello Kitty keychain jingles when you pull your wallet out, but Grandma smacks you again. Fists a wad of cash into your hands.

I can pay for myself, you try.

You think Grandma can’t pay for her baby anymore?

You think you’re a grown-up now? You think

Grandma is old? Use the money!

So you do.

On your way out, the automatic sliding doors don’t open for Grandma, so she trails behind you. She stills and looks up at you. What are you waiting for? Aren’t you going home?

I don’t want to go home, you wish you could say. I don’t want to go home. I have to fold my laundry. I have to clean my room. I have to see if there’s a baby inside of me when I go home, and I don’t want to. I want to go home home, Grandma, but it doesn’t exist. You don’t exist either.

Instead, you nod and let Grandma follow you on the brisk walk to your apartment. Pace yourself slower than usual to accommodate her bad knee, and let her walk in front so she doesn’t think you’re accommodating her bad knee. Your boots pinch your toes in all of the right places, and the plastic handles of the grocery bags cut into your fingers. She’s not real, you know that, but beside her, you remember you’re alive.

Grandma wears a cherry-red peacoat with gold buttons over her floral gardening pants, and a fresh perm to her black locks, like in one of the pictures found in a tattered album from the attic in your youth. Mother was on the porch posing by her zinnias, a hand on her newly round belly, with Grandma by her side. You always liked imagining your father behind the camera, still full of love for your mother, smiling as he took the shot. Grandma never had to watch her daughter’s marriage pull and tear and snap. But she also never got to meet you. Right now, she looks happy.

Why are you here, Grandma?

I go on a walk every day. To be healthy.

You’re dead, Grandma.

Smack.

Aiyah, don’t talk like that! Didn’t your parents teach you better?

Sorry, Grandma.

5

Your mother and father call you big cow in Chinese. They used to be farmers back in China, they’d explain, and giving your eldest a nickname helps them grow up into what you want them to be. Big and strong. You think about it every time you step on the scale after a session at the gym, or when your boyfriend asks if you’re really going to finish the whole plate when you go out to eat, or when the Little Debbie Zebra Cakes are having a two for one deal.

They call you other words, too. Worthless child, Father said when he’d caught you, a more fragile, chubby-cheeked you, clutching your favorite Beanie Baby to your chest, out in the hallway past your bedtime to lay witness to their screaming contest, to their ceramic-plate-throwing-game. You didn’t like the games they played at night. It’s why you always played by yourself.

Clever girl, your parents said the first time you cooked dinner all on your own. Beef and broccoli, steaming and shiny and sweet. The rice cooker sang a triumphant little song for you, too. Father scrunched up the hair on your head, and Mother gave you a kiss. Our baby just learned algebra, and now she can cook for herself, they said. You watched them return to their bedrooms with full bellies and tired smiles. Good girl.

When Grandma speaks to you, she uses your name. Her version of your name. She adds tones where they don’t belong, but hearing it now, it sounds like it was always meant to be that way. Ni-nah.

So you have a boyfriend? Nina?

I do.

First boyfriend?

Fourth, you say quietly.

You wait for Grandma to smack you, to scold you, and you prepare your defenses the way you’ve always done. You’re not the casual, sleeps around kind of girl, you tell yourself, like a soothing salve, like an othering. There have only been four, and you’ve only done it with three. You only did it because they really wanted to. You made them all wait. You were always in control. You were good.

Hmmmmm. Bad luck, Grandma says. Boyfriend four. Four sounds like death.

Mother never taught you the Chinese word for death because she didn’t want you to use it.

Slut, Mother said, when she came home early and caught you on the couch with a boy after the choir concert she’d missed.

He liked your solo in “Joy to the World,” and you liked how the green hoodie he wore smelled like Tide on Mondays.

Your braces clacked together when you tried to kiss him, but that’s all you did. That’s all you did.

Mother locked him in the laundry room while he waited for his parents to pick him up. You’re so stupid, Mother said.

Slut. Slut, slut, slut.

“When Grandma speaks to you, she uses your name. Her version of your name. She adds tones where they don’t belong, but hearing it now, it sounds like it was always meant to be that way.”

6

Grandma wasn’t dead, she would say. She’s just not here anymore. You’ve always wondered what kinds of things Grandma would have taught you, but as you trail past the crimson trees, the crunch of fallen leaves accompanying each kindred step, you think it’d look something like this: Boyfriend four isn’t bad luck, you’d tell her. He loves me. He loves me a lot.

So? Your father said he loved your mother, but I never liked him, Grandma says. He makes my daughter tired. Not happy. I knew something was off from the start. You know, Nina, you have Grandma’s senses, too. You know when something's wrong. Is something wrong? Nina?

Nothing is wrong. He loves me. He says it out loud and everything. He loves me so much he says he sees a future with me. I can’t see the future at all, but he sees me! Isn’t that good, Grandma?

And you love him, Nina?

Of course I love him. Why would someone stay with someone they don’t love? Wouldn’t that be sad for everyone? He always finishes the meals I make for him, every last bite. He holds me when I hear Mother sobbing in my dreams. Strokes my hair. It feels really nice. He makes me feel really nice.

your breath runs even. I have to finish my walk, she says.

Make sure you eat soon, she says, and turns down the street.

Her red peacoat vanishes in the distance, and then she is gone.

Putting away groceries is always calming, meditative. You set up a pot and cutting board to prepare dinner. While the beef shank simmers on the stove, you leave the kitchen and take the little pink box with you to the bathroom. Unwrap its packaging, toss the instructions in the trash. Wait for a few minutes. It’s negative.

A message pops up on your phone. It’s your boyfriend, asking if you’re home. If you want to come over.

Sorry, we can talk in the morning, you reply. I’m having dinner with my grandma tonight.

That evening, you eat two portions by yourself, wheat noodles, daikon radish, yu choy, braised beef, endless ladles of broth. The aromatics fill your lungs, warm your soul. You save the rest for tomorrow.

The test is just to be safe. He just wants me to be safe. He thinks it’s my fault because it is. Because he loves me. He only calls me a slut when I ask him to in bed, except when he gets jealous and loud and I haven’t asked him to, then. He wants me to be the best I can be, because he loves me.

Your fault, Nina? How can it be your fault?

How could it not be your fault, you think. You had gotten into a fight that night, and you only knew one way to fix it. It was you that begged him not to leave.

To know you, to be close to you, to stay inside of you, to want you.

Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

Grandma smacks you on the arm. The moss-ridden brick walls of your apartment building snap into view.

Why would you say something so stupid? Grandma says.

A few droplets wet the wrinkles around her eyes, and she frowns. You blink them away as Grandma catches the grocery bags slipping from your fingers. She tells you to stand up straighter, and wipes the snot streaming down your nose with her sleeve. The mascara leaking into your eyes stings, but you’re alive. Grandma says you are beautiful. Don’t waste it. You’re alive.

You can’t hug her. You won’t meet her. She is dead.

Grandma comforts you until the shaking has stopped, and

7

This is A Rebellion Against My Own Brain

By Claire Emch

8

I struggled with what I was going to write for this article. A lot. The truth is that every time I had an idea and

started to write it, I’d get stuck because everything I wrote seemed unoriginal. Being self-conscious about your looks has been done, being anxious about making friends has been done, being scared about adulthood–it’s all been done. Even what I’m about to write has probably been done. I felt trapped.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that way about a lot of things in my life. I won’t let myself feel safe at school, with friends, or even with family. It’s like my body is always keeping itself on its toes for something—like it can always feel doom coming around the corner, but that doom never strikes. I don’t know how to let go of my breath but I’m about to pass out.

It all started when I made this stupid bet with a friend about who could get a guy to buy them a drink at a bar. After an hour with no success, I wing-manned him and got someone to buy him a drink. He was so happy that he decided to do the same for me. It was the worst ten minutes of my life. He would go up to a guy, introduce me, and ask if they’d like to buy me a drink. I would stand there, heat burning holes in my cheeks, while they’d look me up and down and say no. If the roles were reversed, I’d probably say no, too—it wasn’t like I even talked to these guys. Who wants to spend 5 bucks on a drink for someone they don’t even know when they’re just trying to use that money to get drunk themselves? But for me, it felt like sign after sign after sign that I wasn’t wanted and there was nothing about me that was remotely attractive. It was a waking nightmare.

When the first guy rejected me, my friend could see how much it upset me and tried to fix it by dragging me to a new guy. I said, “Please don’t, just forget about it,” which made him even more determined to continue his mission. I had never had an experience so cinematic before.

I remember thinking how this could not be happening because my vision had transformed into a higher frame-rate version of my real life. There would be a smearing of color, of sound, as I was yanked around a corner and a new person appeared in front of me. I watched as if I was sitting in a theater far away, thinking how unoriginal and insane this whole thing was. It was a blur of different nos.

Sometimes they said sorry, sometimes they just laughed and turned around. Ultimately, I felt sorry for the girl on the screen; this was a terrible situation. After about the fourth rejection, I said, “I’m tired—I need to go home.” After leaving, I kept replaying it over and over again in my head. When it finally washed over me, that this girl was in fact myself and not just a funny story I could tell to a friend because it wasn’t really funny at all, I didn’t feel the urge to cry.

I remember that it was freezing outside, but I didn’t care enough to zip my coat up. When it started to rain, I laughed because it was just too on the nose. All I could really feel was a strange urge for my body to liquefy, melt on the sidewalk, and stay there. On the one hand, I wanted to cry to someone excessively and have them comfort me. On the other, I couldn’t handle the pity that would follow or the judgment about how much I was dramatizing this.

But that’s how it felt to me. I didn’t want to say anything about that night because I knew that if I did, I would describe it like one would describe a truly traumatic event when I knew that it wasn’t. I just couldn’t figure out why this was affecting me so much.

It’s embarrassing how much it did. I didn’t want to go out anymore; I started to doubt that anyone would ever want to date me. I even started to doubt things that were totally unrelated to dating in general, like simple interactions with friends and classmates. On a Friday night, four random guys had determined my whole future for me—or at least gave me a sneak peek of what the rest of my life was going to look like.

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I tried to bounce back and tell myself that I was being stupid—one night does not mean anything, and no one feels sorry for someone who feels sorry about themselves all the time. I had to pick myself back up. But this little voice started popping up in my head every time I talked to someone. At first, it was so nice. It said, “Hey, that was a really good interaction, but maybe don’t laugh as much next time, okay?” or “Your friends probably think nothing about this, but don’t mention her ex-boyfriend ever again—you made her extremely uncomfortable.”

Over time, it grew loud and ugly, screaming over all my other thoughts because I couldn’t stop making mistakes.

“You are so ungrateful; I can’t believe you forgot to text your mom thank you,” “You whine constantly about school and yet you do no work,” “Why can you never just go up and talk to guys? Everyone here thinks you’re a coward.”

But since it had started so nice, only offering suggestions, slight corrections, I never noticed when it became such a bully. I told myself things that would hurt me because, I reasoned, it would toughen me up for my future.

Even writing this now, I never realized how much I assumed that the rest of my life would just amount to people being cruel to me.

It started to choke me out, this voice in my head. Every step that I took, it found fault with, so I simply stopped moving. When you see rejection everywhere, you begin to feel like it would be easier if you didn’t interact with the world as much—you police yourself to death, you withdraw. I started to take five minutes to compose how I would ask my roommate to watch a movie with me. I’d practice it over and over in my mind until it became a chant. A week later, it became ten minutes. Ten minutes of practicing and revising and chanting. Then I just watched as she said goodnight and couldn’t even find the words to say it back. “She’s so busy,” the voice said, “and all you do is distract her. Can’t you see that the best thing to do is leave her alone?”

My body became a cartoon. I could feel my heart leaping out of my chest, straining against my skin, aching for connection, for someone to see how this voice had a hand clamped over my mouth. But I couldn’t move a muscle. I had a pulse, my brain was working, but it wasn’t a life at all. I think I did melt on the sidewalk that day.

I wanted to feel nothing and I wanted to not be inside my body so I gave up the right to speak or move or think.

Just being goo on the floor felt better. But now, when I see everyone stepping over me and living their lives and taking risks and building character, I think I made a mistake.

If anyone asked me today, I would say that I’m totally over that night in the bar, because it happened a relatively long time ago, and it would be embarrassing if I said it still impacted me as much as it does. But I’m tired of being embarrassed and I’m tired of telling myself that I cannot do things because I’ll embarrass myself.

Life is so much better when I’m not embarrassed. I’ve always known that. The part that I didn’t get was that embarrassment is inevitable but letting it control you is a choice.

This piece is a step towards something. I have to admit, it was a pretty scary step. The whole time writing this, I had an incredibly strong urge to glue my hand to the delete button and not stop until all I could see was white.

However, since starting to write this, I feel a little more like my old self. There are times that I want to regress, to melt and disappear and retreat, but I don’t want my whole future to be spelled out by the worst parts of me. I want to let go of the breath I’ve been holding for what seems like forever. So no matter how much my thoughts are telling me how whiney and gross and trite this article is, I’m going to put it out there.

Because this is

A REBELLION AGAINST MY OWN BRAIN. 10

PRAYING TO A PATRONIZING PRIESTESS

By Morgan Butler It’s in the cards, a whisper That I can conceive a time, A time not so few nor far, When a priestess, oh so high, Makes a visit, but I refuse to admit it.

So, I took to my tower, And I tried to make them the fools, Yet only came up With more wishes.

More time.

And less wits.

Sure, I may want it And I may wish for it And I may deserve it, but still She wielded my tears, Wiped from my eyes, And wrote on my wall What I couldn’t quite get.

And again, there we all met.

A fate so often overlooked, Glancing at a reflection.

To damned dialogue, And turns never taken, To hands over my ears, To stimulation, And simulations, To misspellings, And oversharing.

For I could only see In her backward script A devil dependent On its webbed wings, Its throaty desire, Its need to stoke, My own secret hellfire.

The priestess, still Oh so higher, Out of reach and in desire I give up, For the moment, I’m oh so Still.

11

The The Threads Threads of of aa Soul Soul

By Tess Beiter

12

Depression runs in my family. This knowledge was instilled in me from a young age when whispers about my grandfather’s month-long episodes of apathy or my older sister’s anxiety attacks in college began to reach my ears. For as long as I’ve been old enough to grasp the implications of that, I’ve pondered the cruelty of it— that coded into my DNA, woven into the fabric of who I am, is the genetic predisposition for depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. There are absolutely other factors related to developing a mental illness, but the knowledge that I am more likely than most to develop one has always seemed terribly unfair to me, as childish as that may be. Is it truly so predetermined that I will be afflicted with mental illness? Is it true that I have no say in the matter? After a cursory glance, one might answer “yes” to both questions—because in high school, I did indeed develop major depressive disorder.

The majority of that part of my life is hazy, in retrospect. My depression was such a significant part of me for so long that I wonder at the amount of memories it conceals in its cold ocean graveyard, buried beneath delicate layers of ever-shifting sand. It’s odd, the way memories work. A few remain, easily recalled, their edges smoothed and their sting softened from the time they’ve spent clenched in my palms. I can remember portions of the hours spent curled on my hard bedroom floor, unable and unwilling to expend the energy needed to reach my bed, the shower, the kitchen. I can remember a few of the crippling panic attacks that would occur when I drove by myself, when hyperventilation and spasms made it necessary to pull to the side of the road and ride out the waves of panic, alone. I can remember terrible moments in class, at the dinner table, or even surrounded by friends in which my eyes would unfocus, my fingernails would press cruelly into my skin until my forearms were marked with constellations of crescents, and I would feel so horribly detached from my surroundings that I did not feel real.

But the vast majority of those moments are lost. Try as I might to remember, to force myself to confront what I’ve done to myself, they’ve been swept away; only the trace they’ve left on my soul remains to bear witness to their existence. On rare occasions, however, a particularly vivid memory will resurface from the depths of that depression-induced haze. It’s happened before, that in sifting through my memories with wayward hands, I stumble upon one I’d thought was lost. One that cuts so deep it bleeds.

One such memory resurfaced recently, prompted by—of all things—the “36 Questions to Fall in Love.” It was late, around 3 a.m., and I was sitting with a friend on the couch of a too-bright amenity lounge in her apartment building. Despite the late hour and lingering aftereffects of a few glasses of wine, I was surprisingly alert and on edge from the emotional vulnerability I’d already shown through the course of answering the questions. Then the two of us reached Question 18: “What is your most terrible memory?”

We each paused, taken aback, to consider that. To me, my past was mundane and privileged, a product of small-town suburbia with two parents and six siblings. It didn’t offer any obvious answers—I’ve experienced no large tragedies, and my memories of my depression were hazy and muddled. I couldn’t recall any that I would term the most terrible. I examined the room around me, with its orange furniture and sapwood floor, as I turned over the various memories in my mind. I studied them detachedly, skimming over them with careless fingers to discover one that would sting adequately enough to fulfill the question’s requirement.

Nothing came to mind; no easilyrecalled memory offered itself up as an easy out.

As I finally turned to face my friend, to admit defeat in the face of this uncomfortably vulnerable question,

my mind slipped unbidden down an abandoned path. There, as I sat cross-legged with my unsuspecting companion, I found my inner self tangled in a thorny bush of memory, bleeding out of reopened wounds whose existence I’d forgotten— perhaps willfully. I could chalk it up to the wine, or the hour, or maybe simply the fact that I was with a person I would trust with my life.

Regardless of the reason, though, the words left before I could stop them, and I found myself telling her about my first voice memo.

The voice memos started because of my panic attacks. Those occurred whenever their perverse fancy struck—while driving, or in the school bathroom, or alone in my bedroom— and I would find myself completely immobilized. My body would be gripped by repetitive tremors—my hands would scrape at my arms or spasm rhythmically in front of me, and I would rock uncontrollably back and forth. “Panic” doesn’t fully encompass the visceral, primal fear I would feel; these episodes were all-consuming and indescribable.

I absolutely hated them. I felt untethered, completely detached from reality, like I was simultaneously drowning and watching from a safe vantage point as another girl struggled to keep her head above the waves.

Through a hellish process of trial and error, I found that the best way to calm down and escape from the crippling panic and repetitive spasms was to talk myself through what I could only term as my “episodes.”

Speaking aloud helped organize my thoughts and force me into a more rational mindset, and the sound of my own voice grounded me. It offered a lifeline, a chance to pull myself out of the absolute hell I was experiencing; and, drowning as I was, I clung to it.

That night, sitting with my expectant friend, I recalled the night of my first voice memo as the details resurfaced dizzyingly. It had been a bitterly cold evening, deep into the Midwestern winter of my senior year

13

of high school. I was driving home from rehearsal alone, which was a rarity and a known precursor to one of my episodes. On top of that, my mom had asked me to stop for a few groceries on the way, which was an additional personal trigger.

I remember sitting in the driver’s seat of our battered minivan in a snow-laden Kroger parking lot; I was shaking from both hunger and cold, and I knew with a hopeless certainty that I would not make it home without a panic attack. I could barely hold it together, and I hadn’t even shifted gears yet. This time, knowing what was coming, I began trying to talk myself down preemptively. After only a few seconds, though, I began to feel embarrassed. Talking aloud to myself in a dark car, pre-panic attack, felt foolish. I’m not quite sure what inspired my stroke of genius, but rather than give up on what I knew I needed—as I was certainly tempted to—I opened my voice memo app and hit “record.” Somehow symbolically freed by this small action, I talked into my phone for the entire twentyfive-minute drive home—and no panic attack came.

I don’t remember a lot of what I said, but I do remember musing dispassionately about how cruel it was that I’d been destined to suffer from mental illness. I recalled the stories I’d heard of my grandfather’s depressive episodes, how he’d go home to hug his wife and kids after attending the funerals of his siblings who’d committed suicide. I recalled the persistent dull eyes and drawn expression of my older sister when she’d been my age. I recalled my mother’s stories of the siblings who’d berated her for not drinking like they did, the ones she’d drive home from parties, knowing that if she didn’t, they’d try themselves and likely wouldn’t survive the trip home.

If my mental illness was so clearly foretold, I’d wondered, then why hadn’t anyone noticed when I finally gave in to its temptations? If it was so clearly written on the wall, why would anyone—myself included—be surprised when I stopped being able

14

to resist its grip? The bleak, lonely streets and cold winter wind did not offer me an answer.

Both in that voice memo and sitting with my friend, I remember wondering tiredly why my life seemed to pale in comparison to everyone else’s. I think a part of me has always felt that way, like I’m running a race but I’ve lost sight of everyone in front of me. Or maybe it’s more like everyone else has already started and I’m still standing behind the white chalk line, unable to gather the courage to begin running. I know I shouldn’t care so much, shouldn’t needlessly compare myself to everyone around me. But I do, and it has irrevocably shaped me. I can’t look at someone without cataloging the ways they’re seemingly miles ahead of me—the tilt of their smile when telling a well-received joke, their busy social calendar, how their hair still looks flawless in the afternoon.

These comparisons have instilled in me a fear that I am always lacking and will never quite measure up to everyone around me. It’s a desperate fear that screams that if I don’t consume the beauty around me, the aspects of others that I admire, the truth of me will be exposed—and that truth won’t be beautiful, or even bearable. I need to swallow that beauty and hope it infuses my being.

It’s an insensible desire, parasitic in nature, but I can’t help it.

This maladaptive coursing of my thoughts ensures that I am comically terrible at accepting compliments.

It’s an uncomfortable experience, nodding and saying “thank you” to a positive comment when I struggle to believe it myself. I’d like to think I’m improving—I no longer dismiss or deny others’ compliments, which was once my typical course of action— but even now, some remarks will render me speechless. A compliment on something as simple as my attentiveness to my friends’ schedules and preferences or my comfortable conversationality makes me feel noticed, seen for who I truly am, and that level of vulnerability is both

unbearable and strangely addictive.

An example of this discomfort of mine occurred at the beginning of this past summer when my younger sister graduated high school. At her open house, I was busy helping straighten up when my mother approached me with a woman she’s kept in touch with over the years—a woman who used to volunteer in my kindergarten class.

Her eyes, creased with smile lines, lit up when she saw me. She told me how she thinks about me often, how my kindergarten self has stuck with her for over fifteen years. “You were so bright and cheerful,” she said, smiling.

“You were so thoughtful, always trying to include all the other kids.”

I stammered out a “thank you,” and the conversation continued; I told her that I’m in nursing school, and she talked about the book club she leads.

At the end of our talk, she gave me a hug, looked me firmly in the eyes, and said that she’d always known I’d end up doing incredible things. She told me that I hadn’t changed, that I was still the same cheerful, thoughtful girl that she remembered. I was floored; I stood there, amidst the bustle of the open house, gripping a blue cup of lemonade. It was simply too much for me to handle.

I left the open house a few minutes later in a daze and crossed the street to the playground of the school I’d attended from kindergarten to eighth grade. I stood there for maybe ten minutes, struggling not to cry as I overlooked the grassy field, the tiredlooking swings, the red-blue-yellow play structure—none of which had changed in the interim. But I had.

I felt completely separate from the girl who’d once played tag with her classmates here, who’d tried to learn to cartwheel on that grass for nine years, who’d buried a time capsule below the tree by the chain link fence.

In a few short years, I’d completely detached from my childhood self, the girl the volunteer remembered. I felt so irrevocably different, so altered, that it broke my heart. What had I done to that little girl I used to be?

What had gone so terribly wrong to

lead that girl to years of being tired of her existence, of being afraid to drive alone and risk a panic attack? I may have grown past that stage in my life, but it certainly changed me. I knew this playground like the scarred palm of my hand, could navigate it with my eyes closed; but did it recognize me?

I’ve created an odd tapestry of myself, built from the threads of others I’ve adopted. It’s a strange coping mechanism designed to conceal the person hidden deep within, to contort myself into who I think other people want me to be. I often fake positivity because of how comforting it was when my camp counselor eight years ago told us that everything would turn out okay. I push others’ desires before my own like my mom always has. I emulate how my friends and siblings tell jokes, using their sense of humor and the cadence of their laughs. If it helps, I tell myself, then it can’t be that harmful—as I actively ignore the way those shards of others cut into me from the inside. I can feel them lodged within my ribcage, pushing against my skin, struggling to graft to my soul.

Maybe the heart that pulses inside my chest remembers how to beat solely as myself, but I fear it’s been too long.

Sometimes, though, when I’m caught by surprise, I forget to pose as who I think the people around me want to see. I’ll laugh like me again, or get so caught up in telling a story that I can recognize myself in the words I speak. It stalls my breath in my throat every time—I don’t realize I’m acting until I stop. The masks I’m capable of putting on probably don’t scare me as much as they should.

The body has a long memory, but the thrumming of these personas inside of my mind seems to drown out the truth spelled in my bones. If my life was a masterpiece before I tore it all up, shredding it in an attempt to be someone else, I hope the biology inside me remembers even when I cannot.

A part of me does grip on to who I once was, though, with trembling but determined hands. That part of

me believes desperately that I’ll be able to find myself someday, that I’ll be able to pick out the buried threads of myself and weave them into the person I truly am. A warm framework, the bright colors of the sunset rendered in shades of gray, is imprinted behind my eyelids when I close my eyes. Beauty, of a sort, hidden within. The truest parts of me, perhaps, attempting to make themselves known. The trouble lies in finding and expressing my broken beauty, in allowing myself to believe in my inherent self. Words can only say so much; actions can only help so many people. If there is a God, she knows I’m no artist. So what medium is left? What method is there to understand and communicate the artistry of a soul?

To this day, I can’t quite pinpoint what motivated me to claw myself out of the depression I’d slipped into in high school. Believe me, I wish I could. My therapist did always praise my resilience. Maybe the core of me holds a survivor, a girl with a spine of steel and an unbreakable will to live. But that seems too poetic. I was simply a girl, hungry and alone and bone-achingly tired, who decided she wanted more than the half-existence she knew, suspended in a haze of exhaustion and self-hatred. More than anything, ravenously and desperately, she wanted to live—and her life at the time did not feel much like living.

In the depths of my depression, I could not possibly imagine living to turn eighteen. And yet here I stand, defiant, about to turn twenty. I haven’t needed to make a voice memo in over a year now. I still have all of them, but I don’t think I’ll ever listen back. They remain, though, a grim reminder to placate my fear that I’ll one day slip back into that ocean and not remember how to drag myself out.

and a beginning. The wind stirred my hair through the open windows and the tree-lined streets were gilded in gold. At that moment, I found myself wondering how I couldn’t even remember when I’d stopped being afraid to drive without starting a voice memo. It seemed like so long ago, but it was a mere two years prior that I was too exhausted to possibly summon the excitement that I now felt about the upcoming school year.

I realized then that an inclination for depression may have been spelled into my genetic makeup, and the threads of my personality may be tangled in the pieces of others that I’ve adopted.

But that does not define me. I am more than my mental illness, or the pieces of myself I’ve buried in my feverish attempts to become someone else, or the terrible experiences my mind has forced me through. I can defy what is written on the walls.

As I drove alone down the winding roads I’ve known my whole life, the same ones who have borne witness to my panic attacks, I couldn’t help but thank my heart for continuing to beat despite everything, for allowing me to find and live the life I so desperately want. There’s enough artistry in that strength, I hope, to sate my thirst for inner beauty—at least until I am able to stitch together the threads of who I truly am.

On an indolent, honeyed day this past August, I drove home from work for the last time that summer. It felt a little surreal—August evenings always do, eager and familiar and nostalgic— and I knew that a page was turning, that this moment was both an ending

15

The Girl

in the Mirror

By Ruhi Gulati

16

7:13 a.m.

“It is over now, you are on your own.”

This is the image I first open my eyes to—big criminal numbers blasted on my phone as my alarm goes off, sending a river of panic through me before I regain awareness of my surroundings. I peel off my thick blanket protecting me from the rush of wind coming through the fan above my lofted bed and sit up, bumping my head on the exposed pipe bulging out from my 4-bedroom apartment ceiling. Groggily, I crawl down my ladder and make my way to my bathroom, reaching for the light switch.

I have no words. I sit frozen while all the anxiety of the day bubbles up, ready to explode. But I know I need to gather myself so I am at least somewhat prepared for my next class. I slowly inhale, pushing down all my concerns, and I look down, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. Flashes of shoes of all kinds— from dark blue Converse to black boots—and crumpled, dried autumn leaves occasionally occupy my vision, but I keep my gaze on the ground, avoiding any cracks in the pathway. Until I hear my name called.

Immediately, I am blinded by the bright overhead light, so it takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. Once they do, I begin to riffle through my drawers, searching for a hair tie when I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. The girl in front of me looks peculiar. Her thick black hair that formerly fell across her back in pretty soft waves appears more frizzy and is bound in clumps. Dark circles surround her sunken eyes, and the furrows lining her forehead from stress obtrude.

I turn around to see my friend from psychology. I greet her but am quickly cut off by her incessant rant about how I was rude to her during class. Before I can even respond, she storms off, leaving me in utter confusion. I attempt to recall my previous conversations with her, but my memory has been quite cloudy recently. So I continue down the path to my next class, entering through the doors and choosing a seat on the far right. I pull out my notebook, eager for a distraction from this horrendous day. Yet, as my professor drones on in her monotonous voice, I find myself sinking into my chair, fluttering my eyes with each yawn. And soon, I fall asleep again.

In an attempt to relieve the tension in my shoulders, I take a deep breath, but the boulder of anxiety that sits atop my chest, suffocating me, refuses to move. So I continue on with my morning routine and end up in my kitchen, grabbing a slightly rotten apple from the depths of my fridge. In spite of my rough start to the day, I decide to wear my favorite pair of dark blue Converse. Yet, after digging through my entire closet, I surmise they are nowhere to be found. I am about to ask one of my roommates if they have seen them, but suddenly the silence of the apartment—which normally is filled with muffled laughter, cabinet doors closing shut, and coffee brewing—becomes overwhelmingly apparent. And I realize no one is home.

My psychology class is about to start, so I reluctantly lace up a pair of my old sneakers and rush off to class. I search through the mass of faces for my usual spot in the second row next to my friend, who always saves me a seat. However, today, she sits next to a girl whose face inconveniently faces away from me. I can only catch a glimpse of her back; I notice her dark black hair is styled in perfect waves and that she is wearing a pair of dark blue jeans and Converse to match that look eerily similar to mine.

Unfortunately, I have to trudge forward, deciding on a seat in the back corner of the giant lecture hall right as my professor begins to speak. I attempt to turn my attention away from the girl and toward my professor, but my exhaustion creeps in, the lights dimming as my eyes begin to close. Seconds turn to minutes, and I am abruptly awoken by the sounds of people riffling through their backpacks and the shuffling of feet against the wooden stairs, catching the last slide of my professor’s presentation which reads, “Don’t forget to turn in your paper at the end of class today.”

Alarm arises in my body as I realize I had completely forgotten to submit the paper due in this class. I had been relying on this final assignment to bring up my grade after I had failed my previous exam, but now it was too late. I vividly remember last night working on the assignment wrapped in my ragged blanket at the head of my bed by the grand window overlooking the desolate campus streets, my computer lying in my lap. After finalizing my concluding statement, I had taken a moment to peer outside at the array of lights emanating from different buildings. Heavy rain was pounding on my window, and I must have drifted off to sleep only to wake up to this awful morning, deterring me from remembering to print my paper.

My heartbeat quickly escalates, and my body shakes with panic as the horrid realization dawns on me: failing this paper means I will fail this class, which means my career is in ruins, so my life is now in ruins. My vision starts to blur, and I wipe my face with the palm of my hand, grabbing my backpack with the other. I rush down the stairs before my breakdown erupts and run through the doors, landing on a bench hidden behind the corner of the Psychology Department. I scroll through my contacts until I reach my father’s name, and then I click call.

It rings only twice before I hear a voice, but before a word leaves my mouth, I am met with incomprehensible shouting from both my father and my mother. The last statement I make out before they hang up is

7:13 a.m.

This is the image I first open my eyes to; I am awoken by the blaring sound of my alarm. I look around and see that I am back in my bed. I peel off the ragged blanket and rise up too quickly, bumping my head against the pipe. I reach for my phone and check the date. It reads the same date as this morning. Maybe this was all a dream? I think to myself. Suddenly, my legs swing over the edge of my bed, landing on my ladder with a thud. I crawl down the ladder to my bathroom, but something feels off. My movements are rigid, my body feels strange. It is as if I am going through the motions of my morning routine without any control over my body. It is as if I am on autopilot.

I turn the shower knob all the way to the right, and then I step in.

The scorching hot water scalds my skin, but I remain still, letting it burn me. The steam from the shower is everywhere now, and it is suffocating. I dry myself off and change into my clothes, cracking open the door a bit to let the steam out.

Even the mirror is coated in a thin layer of fog, blocking my reflection.

I grab a rag and wipe the mirror in firm motions until my reflection is pristine. But something feels wrong. The girl in the mirror’s face is caked with makeup, and her hair is tightly coiled in curls too perfect.

Instinctively, I reach for my own only to find it matted. With both hands, I attempt to stroke through the knots in my hair. Then, I look down. My hands are filled with its clumps.

A scream escapes from my lips, but not from my reflection. The girl in the mirror remains perfectly still, her gaze unmoving. I lean a little forward, fixating on the only feature of hers that show imperfection: her eyes. They are struck wide open, red with pain. She does not even blink once. It is as if they are plastered on, as if everything inside of her cries except for her eyes.

I blink a few times, and when my eyes open again, my reflection is back to being a spitting image of me. Maybe I need to go back to bed, I think, so I turn around in the direction of the bathroom’s exit. But my feet won’t move. I peer back towards the mirror, back at my reflection. I lean even closer now until we are less than an inch apart.

Suddenly, the girl smiles, the corners of her mouth twisting upward in a way that is almost sinister. And then in a burst of blood-curdling laughter, she spins and runs out the bathroom door, donning a pair of dark blue Converse. I place my hand on the mirror, attempting to process what just happened. But it is firm and unmoving. I turn around, wanting to chalk this experience up to pure exhaustion but everywhere I turn, I see the same image: the mirror.

I am trapped. I fall to the floor, nauseous from all the moving in circles.

But the walls start to cave in. I am banging on the mirror now, my arms, ridden with pain and my eyes, filled with tears. My screams fade into the echoes of the girl in the mirror’s laughter.

17

My Ghosts

By Hanna Young

I’ve always hated endings. Even the ones tied in neat little bows with a happily ever after bug me. I mean, how can we really know that it was all that happy if we don’t know what happens in the after? Nevertheless, I loved reading as a kid. I craved the escape into a brand new world entirely unlike my own. Unfortunately, the more enthralling the story, the more difficult returning to reality became. After finishing a book series that I’d spent several months enraptured with when I was ten, I became so upset that I cried. I stumbled downstairs with swollen eyes and a sullen pout. My mom was understandably concerned and asked what was wrong, but I just held my arms out for a hug. She quickly wrapped me up tightly.

Sometime in the previous year, I’d grown tall enough that my chin fit snugly on top of her shoulder, so her breath ruffled my hair. She tried asking again what was bothering me.

I was embarrassed to admit I’d gotten so worked up over a book, so I just shrugged and said, I’m sad. I hate endings.

She let out a heavy sigh and held me tighter.

Yeah, me too.

taste so good. I’d ask her why she insisted on wearing pantyhose year-round, even under pants and during the summer. I’d show her my tattoos and she wouldn’t like them, but that’s okay. I’d ask her how she bore everything so stoically. I’d ask her if that made her feel strong or lonely. I’d tell her I was sorry for thinking she was boring. She wasn’t. I’d tell her that I love her.

Some nights, my neurosis takes over, and I’ll spend agonizing minutes or even hours staring at the ceiling, mulling over that time I forgot my lines in the thirdgrade play or the day I got my first period in the sixth grade and had to make an urgent, whispered call to my mom to pick me up or the moment I told someone I’m sorry, I love you and they said whatever. My mind conducts a roll call of every embarrassing, enraging, excruciating memory and performs a flawless reenactment of each one. The worst moments are frozen, rewound, and displayed in a slow-motion replay. My mind works tirelessly, picking me apart ruthlessly, recounting all the things I should have said, should have done, should have known. It’s as if my past self is lying beside me, whispering in my ear incessantly like the annoying kid at the slumber party who just won’t go to sleep. It’s hard to ignore her, so I don’t. Instead, I tuck her in and wish her sweet dreams, then turn over and close my eyes. In the morning, sunlight floods my room, splashing over me, alone, and it’s like she was never there at all.

“My mind conducts a role call of every embarrassing, enraging, excruciating memory and performs a flawless reenactment of each one.”

My grandmother died on a frigid February evening. I still remember the blaring sound of the electronic monitor as her heart stopped, the way it shook my insides, and how the bleached tile floor seemed to tilt beneath my unsteady feet. My lungs tightened and a new emptiness settled between my ribs. A part of me had been carved away, a space left to house all the things I didn’t even realize I wanted to tell her and ask her and share with her until she was no longer there to listen. Now, I have a small chasm between my heart and ribcage brimming with unanswered questions and untold stories.

If I got a second chance to speak to my grandmother, I’d ask her how she made her eggplant parmesan

18

My best friend Gillian and I grew up in a small town. It’s a lot of fields and cows and chickens and trees. There’s one main road running through it that connects I-95 to a couple of casinos in the neighboring towns. There is little to do in our hometown besides driving through it. So, for years, that’s exactly what we

did. We’d spend entire days and appalling amounts of gas money just driving. What I learned from our extensive experience is that—despite what driver’s ed may have tried to teach you—the car is the ideal place to multitask. While driving, you can talk, scream, sing, cry, eat, gossip. In my opinion, it’s usually best if you do a combination of all of the above. Mostly, though, we fantasized about all the things we’d do when we were finally able to leave our pit-stop town. Eventually, we got exactly what we wanted. We decided to attend universities that took us as far away from the fields and the cows and the chickens and the trees as we could possibly get. Coincidentally, that also took us 530.3 miles away from each other. And just like that, a second ache settled itself in my chest, pressing against my heart.

One of the nurses noticed how distressed I was after my grandmother’s passing. In the quiet that abruptly followed the screeching of the heart monitor, I heaved heavy breaths and choked on salty tears. In an attempt to console me, she made a plaster cast of my grandmother’s handprint, covered it in red glitter, wrote her name in neat script across the top, and gave it to me. At the time, I was a little weirded out. The glitter seemed gaudy and ostentatious in the sterile hospital room with death still lingering in the air.

For a long time, the cast sat in a box on a high shelf, untouched and unseen. Then, one day months later, I found myself sinking to sit on my bedroom floor.

The sky beyond my window was dark and heavy with unshed rain. Sitting there, my grief felt like those roiling, black clouds. All the unresolved emotions expanded in that void nestled in between my ribs, brushing against every frayed nerve, intensifying the hollow ache I’d grown used to ignoring. Suddenly, I

wanted nothing more than a mothball-scented hug, but no one was there to give it. So, I climbed on a chair and retrieved the box. I opened it slowly, oddly reverent now of something that had made me so uncomfortable before. I pressed the pads of my fingers into the imprint, then my whole palm. It was just barely larger than my own hand. When I finally pulled away, glitter still clung to me. It stuck to me all day. Even after I scrubbed and scratched at my hands before going to bed that night, little spots that shone in the light remained. It made me smile even as I shook my head in annoyance. Grandma always gave hugs for a little too long.

It’s funny how we keep pieces of each other.

Sometimes, I look at the ratty puka shell bracelet hanging from my rearview mirror (bought on impulse as Gillian and I enabled each other’s unhealthy spending habits). I slip on the “inappropriate” t-shirt she bought me for my birthday (because I asked for it).

I see an artsy picture of Italy (she’s obsessed) or young Channing Tatum (she’s really obsessed). In those little moments, I swear I can hear wild, boundless laughter. I’m sitting with my feet on the dash and my fingers are dancing in the wind just beyond the edge of the window. The sunlight slips through breaks in the leaves above and shines through the sunroof, creating a whirl of shadow and light across our skin.

I’m smiling. In those little moments, it’s like we never left the car. We didn’t move hundreds of miles away from each other. She’s right there, as always. We say goodbye every time we hang up the phone but we don’t need to. She’s always right there, around the corner, up the street, behind the door. We say goodbye but we never really leave each other.

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I’ve always hated endings. Ironically, I think the part that makes me hate them most of all is how they refuse to leave you. The chapter is closed, you’ve said your goodbyes, and the casket was long ago buried; and yet, all the feelings and the memories linger. Endings haunt us. They’re phantoms of our past selves still trapped in the grief of old heartbreaks. They trail us through life whispering quietly so only we can hear, reminding us of their sorrow, how it hurts, how it just won’t stop hurting. They moan and cry, begrudging our ability to keep moving forward while they remain trapped in the past. If you’re not careful, they’ll grab hold of you, yanking you backward into their grasp and smothering you in their urgency to be unburdened of the heavy feelings that make them ache. You could suffocate under the weight of them. Because of this, it’s always my first impulse to run away when those soft whispers reach for me.

But I’ve never been able to outrun my ghosts. They follow doggedly, unrelenting in their determination to be known and heard. The faster I run, the louder their whispers become, turning into horrific howls that make me want to press my hands to my ears and curl into myself until it finally stops. They’re impossible to ignore. So I’ve stopped trying to. I’ve found that when you really look at the ghosts of your past unflinchingly and accept them for what they are and forgive them for what they aren’t, they become far less terrifying. Now, when they call out to me, I stop and acknowledge them. I look them in the eye and give them a smile. Sometimes, I even let them hold my hand while we walk on and I help carry those old, heavy feelings. I often spend the rest of the day with red glitter coating my palms and the tips of my fingers, but I don’t mind. I admire the way it sparkles and shines under the sun. Then, I look forward and keep walking. . .

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Ready TO

Begin

Again.

SEARCHING FOR

By Isabella Oh

Content Warning: Death God, why have you forsaken me? Where was my writing on the wall—an ominous hand floating through the air, my warning sign of inevitable doom, my cautionary tale so I could change what was to come—just like you did in the Bible for King Belshazzar during his feast.

Was I not renowned enough for my wisdom, did I not deserve to be bestowed the knowledge of imminent hardship? What mortal sin did I commit where I was no longer owed this? In my first month of college, there was a single call—“one of your dad’s coworkers was concerned because he didn’t show up for work, your aunt went to go check on him, I’m so sorry.” All of a sudden, plane tickets were booked to fly back home, single-parent financial aid was processed, and I lost my dad all in one day. I remember asking God, carry this cross, turn water into wine, write on walls, do whatever it takes to bring him back.

In the haze of subsequent months, grief rolled through me like waves—pummeling into me, waiting, watching for me to pick myself up, only to rock through me over and over again, to take the breath from my lungs, where my emotions were water and I was drowning. Grief is hideous. It’s loss, it’s pain, suffering, heartache, and the emptiness of permanence. The permanence of this feeling is suffocating, all-consuming, and paralyzing. Where was my writing on the wall? Where was my warning that I would cry in almost every building on campus, that the friends I’d known for one month would quickly become my deus ex machina, the ones to bring me out of the worst thing to happen, that professors would be at such a loss for words they wouldn’t know what to do but allow missed assignments to continue stacking.

Forget thinking about if I could’ve done something to change this ultimate end result. The least I deserved was a heads-up that not a day will pass when I don’t think about him. If God sent one down, I must have missed it. This is why, in those following months, everything became a writing on the wall. I was so fearful to miss another one, I promised myself I wouldn’t be caught off-guard. I was convinced that if I had been given a warning sign about my dad, I would’ve prepared myself, would’ve said my goodbyes, would’ve coped better than I was. Because when something like this happens,

your life is thrown so far off axis, you make yourself dizzy orbiting the wrong thing.

My entire existence became a premonition.

An explanation for why God would do this to me, his unsent message that the days were always numbered and that the scales were never in our favor. Suddenly, the eyes I inherited from my father were only given to me to remember what his eyes would look like crinkled in laughter and welled with tears. But only my eyes will stretch and prune with age, seeing the world passing without him on it. Maybe his extensive recipe book wasn’t a reference for how many cloves of garlic go into spaghetti or the right spices for Korean kimchi stew. Maybe instead, the book existed because one day, those recipes and the memories that came with them would be the only thing that truly felt like home. Maybe somewhere between all the long car rides to dance competitions, all the cheering at school award ceremonies, my dad knew this was coming. If I look into his journals and his grocery store lists, I’m afraid I’ll find some writing on the wall that this was always meant to be. No matter how much I try not to, I’m always looking for these writings on the wall. They’re hideous and painful, but they’re real.

And without permission, time passes. Thanksgiving, Christmas, the start of a new year, your 53rd birthday, Father’s Day, my 19th birthday, the start of my second year of college. My eyes look a little more like mom’s after she taught me how she does her eyeliner. I make kimchi stew for my roommates, in a house we’ve made a home.

The grief is still there, the waves are still crashing; I’ve just taught myself how to swim. I’ve taught myself to look out into the water, to split the sea, and to miss you in abundance. I’ve accepted that what I once saw as premonitions are less of warnings but more of proof that you were once here. My prayers to God sound more like songs than cries because you’re in everything I call home. And while the writings on the wall are hideous, they tell me that I am everything I am because of you.

21

Controlling the cave

By Isabel Hopson

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Steady Arm and Warm Breath in Dry Darkness, beautiful Red Light.

Fingertips of my brain graze carvings on my wall of fate.

Symbols familiar, markings comforting.

I read back to front, front to back, back to front with the softest touch of all.

My hand does not leave the side of the cave, every etch traced, vision blurry, arm steady.

Running now, heat through my lungs, heat through my mouth, burning my nose.

Fearing what the message reads, unable to pull away.

Short breath, beating chest.

The message on the wall is clear, I must follow it, my air dry and my breath warm.

Legs give out.

Hand torn from wall.

Finger pushes away writing.

The coolness of the cave is enveloping, and I lay hidden in its shadows, helpless.

A figure follows my path, fingertips on the wall.

From afar I see: one hand carves and the other follows close behind.

She writes upon the wall, then traces the message, believing the fate she writes, using inevitably as protection, preparing her strength, creating an obsession bright in darkness dry.

She loops around my cave faster and faster, addicted to the thrill.

I call out but she cannot hear.

I break free but she cannot see.

I run towards her and pass right through.

My heart moves to my throat, the figure disappears, I drop the carving knife.

The cave shakes slowly, the ceiling crumbles, the wall fractures.

I move towards a world of more than the writing on the walls.

I move towards a world of fear and the beautiful red light.

23

WE DON’T

BELONG HERE

By Eliza Phares

Content Warning: Homophobia The night started off like a typical Friday, a quick pre-game in the dorm and then going out. However, on this particular night, I was visiting my girlfriend for the first time at Michigan State. It was a moment we’d been dreaming of since high school; we were both excited to start this new chapter together. We’d started dating as I was wrapping up my senior year of high school and she was finishing her junior year. It was an awkward time to begin a relationship, but we’d known each other for years at that point and figured a year of long distance would be a breeze. Through facetimes and visits on breaks, we’d been waiting for the moment when we both would experience the freedom of college together.

As we got ready, I decided to change out of my typical fit of baggy jeans and a sweater to something slightly more revealing but only ended up switching my sweater to a tank top. I immediately missed the warmness and oversized fit the sweater gave me.

I missed how it reflected my personal style, how

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it let me present myself as more than just the way my body looked. I didn’t want to wear a strappy, glittery tank top my girlfriend gave me but I felt like I should. Still, I felt a bit out of place with my baggy jeans, with their too many pockets and shapeless silhouette. Luckily, I didn’t look like a complete outcast in our group of girls, but as we started walking outside, I felt like I looked wildly different than most other people.

Everyone else fit in with the traditional “going out” look: Corset top, leather pants, mini skirts, none of which I owned. It made me feel insecure, like I was in a place where I didn’t belong. A feeling that I had experienced before, and one that I didn’t want to experience again. But, at that point, I was so excited to see my girlfriend that I didn’t care where I was or what I was wearing, only that I was with her.

So, we braved a 20-minute walk and made our way to some random frat. The whole time I felt off. It was dark out, dreary and weirdly quiet for a Friday night in August. I was in a strange place with my girlfriend’s friends, people I barely knew. We kept going in the wrong direction trying to find the house, stumbling along the streets of a neighborhood I’d

never been in. When we finally made it to the house and walked down to the basement I couldn’t stop thinking about how out of place I felt. The sweaty, sticky, dark basement with blaring music didn’t help. My baggy jeans and my girlfriend’s too-small tank top made me feel like some sort of imposter trying to dress to the expectation of the guys around us, but sort of failing to do so. I decided to ignore this feeling, just trying to soak in the moment of my first night in college with my girlfriend. We were in our own little world amidst the crowded, black basement. I tried to only focus on her, to ignore all our other surroundings. I thought back to all those late-night Facetime calls of us wishing we were in college together, but I wasn’t sure if this moment was what I’d pictured.

pass off as someone I wasn’t, trying to conform to the space rather than letting it conform to me.

As we kissed during a song, my gut immediately told me something was wrong. I could feel the mood shift as the guys in the room started to stir, their gazes judging my every move. As I looked up, about fifteen of them were standing on a platform directly over us, pointing, staring, objectifying. A wave of disgust went through my body. I felt unwelcome and unsafe; never have I wanted to leave a place so badly in my life. My girlfriend finally started to notice as one of the guys came towards us. He stepped off the platform, cut through the group, and locked eyes with me, suddenly getting so close that we were touching. As he started to reach out to touch us, my girlfriend shoved him away, and he screamed, “What did you expect, you’re in a frat!” The crowd of guys around him dispersed. We both looked at each other, shocked to our core and feeling revolted.

I grabbed her hand and we quickly left, never to return again. Later that night as I was trying to fall asleep his words echoed in my mind and I couldn’t help but think it was my own naivety that led to this happening.

Now, my girlfriend and I stick to hanging out with friends on weekends in different spaces, spaces where we are welcomed wholeheartedly. The last time we went out together, as we walked through my friend’s door, I felt like I belonged. I didn’t have any feelings of uncertainty, doubt, or regret. Nothing gave me anxiety or made me feel weary of what was to come next. I felt like I was in a space where I could be myself and express myself in any way that I wanted. And though sometimes I feel like I’m missing out on the typical college frat experience, going to a space where I do not belong will never be worth the possibility of missed memories.

Looking back now, it seems inevitable. This was a place where men felt entitled to any woman who stepped in. Every woman I saw was in a group, creating a safe space of individuals around her that she could depend upon in case something bad were to happen. According to Our Wave, an organization that empowers victims of sexual harassment, men in fraternities are three times as likely to sexually assault women than men who are not affiliated (Emsley). It seems that every woman I know has had some bad experience in a frat, typically centering around men acting predatory towards them under the guise of alcohol.

Work Cited Emsley, K. (2022, December 18). Let’s Get Greek: Sexual Assault Trends Within College Greek Life. Our Wave. https://www. ourwave.org/ post/lets-get-greek-sexual-assault-trends-withincollege-greeklife#:~:text=Research%20has%20found%20that%20 fraternity,raped%20than%20other%0college%20women

I should have known that this organization, part of a network with a long history of misogyny, was not a safe space for my girlfriend and me.

I should have known not to go down to the basement when the glares of the frat guys eying my body up and down made me sick, looking at every girl as a potential fuck rather than an actual human being.

I should have known from the first feeling of doubt, the moment when I felt uncomfortable in my own clothes, that this wasn’t the place for me—trying to

25

Fixing My Disorder Didn’t Fix Me

By Anna Nachazel

Content Warning: Disordered Eating, Suicidal Ideation The first time I ate a vegetable that wasn’t baby food I was 19 years old. It was a side of broccoli from an Olive Garden in Fort Gratiot, Michigan, and I had a panic attack in my mom’s car before we even went in. You can still see a little redness in my eyes in the photo she took of my first bite.

She made a joke about putting said photo in the “Baby’s Firsts” section of my baby book. I tried to take it with humor and not be insulted.

Everyone knows at least one “picky eater.” My whole life that’s what everyone thought I was.

That’s what I thought I was—an annoying brat who couldn’t just be grateful for what she was given. My best friend in elementary school was allergic to wheat, eggs, milk, and peanuts. She literally couldn’t eat most foods without winding up in the hospital. I could (or at least I thought I could) but I never did.

I skipped sleepovers or brought snacks with me because I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat with my friends. I made myself Bagel Bites or Kraft Easy Mac in the microwave for dinner almost every day for years, because I felt bad asking my mom to accommodate my choices. But, in many senses, it wasn’t a choice.

I have a sensory processing/eating disorder called avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, or ARFID, though I didn’t know that until I was 18. I like to specify that ARFID is a product of sensory issues every time I introduce it for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s accurate. My senses of taste and smell don’t work like other people’s do.

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Strawberry jam tastes unbearably bitter to me and sesame oil smells like burning rubber and also somehow body odor. Second, people react in a very specific way when you tell them you have an eating disorder.

They invariably assume it has something to do with my body image and either make a comment about how I’m “normal-sized” or “beautiful,” which they unfortunately see as the same thing. Though I personally do have body image and food restriction issues, you do not need to have either to be

diagnosed with ARFID. Treatment for ARFID is complicated because it requires you to try new foods, which is basically hell for anyone who has the disorder. After being diagnosed, I avoided treatment for a year because I knew I wasn’t ready for it. My diet has almost exclusively consisted of various forms of yellow to beige carbohydrate-rich foods like wheat products and potatoes since I started eating solid food. I wasn’t ready to jump to an apple or even oatmeal

(I maintain to this day that its texture is weird). But, in the spring of 2021—thanks to the Mosher-Jordan dining hall—the reality of staying unhealthy started to become scarier than trying a new food.

I am a senior this year and I began college during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I lived in South Quad for a total of two months before moving back in with my parents. My dining hall experience the first time around was pretty horrible. The only things I could consistently eat were the breakfast menu and the chicken tenders. But, we also weren’t allowed to eat with our friends, so I didn’t have much motivation to go to the dining hall in the first place. I could turn to my old buddies Bagel Bites and Kraft Easy Mac, watch an episode of The Office, and feel good about my meal. Sophomore year I lived in Stockwell and had much more success socially, partially because restrictions were pulled back a bit and we were actually allowed to eat with other people. Other than breakfast, which I usually slept through, I think I ate a total of three meals alone that year. Lunches and dinners were unmissable social events. To be honest, every social event was unmissable. I can only speak for myself and my friends, but it was like we were trying to cram our entire underclassman experience into one year. We used to make jokes that our lives were like TV shows because some drama was always happening.

Mosher-Jordan was not kind to me during my year on the Hill. To be clear, I didn’t inform them of my disorder and I had decent-to-positive interactions with everyone who worked there. The blame was partially on me for not getting help

and partially just a product of the circumstances. I lost ten pounds in one month, completely unintentionally. I barely worked out and all I ate was cheese pizza, but, if you’re me at least, when the only thing you can eat two meals a day of is pizza, you kind of just stop eating. Part of it was that it wasn’t great pizza and it always made me feel super greasy and gross, but most of my motivation for limiting my pizza intake was social. As a kid I had challenged myself to a “pizza week” where I only ate pizza products for fun. I love pizza. I have always loved pizza. But when you’re eating every meal with the same people—–who were strangers up until that year—–you start to wonder if they notice that habit and judge you for it.

Though I’m still friends with most of those people and they’ve never audibly judged me for my relationship with food, I don’t think that anxiety about judgment is unfounded. I like to think as a societywe’re getting better, but when I was kid it seemed like everyone was entitled not only to have an opinion about my diet but to voice it repeatedly. The lead mentor of my high school robotics team had a habit high school robotics team had a habit of lecturing me and my neurodivergent best friend about how refusing food that grossed us out made us ungrateful brats.

He had no sense of smell. If anyone doesn’t have a right to judge if a food has universal appeal, it’s someone who can’t smell it.

Refusing to eat had predictable consequences. Not only did I lose weight, but I lost all of my energy. I have never napped as much as I did that year, and I have clinical depression, so that’s saying something. I was incredibly irritable and almost alienated all of the friends I was trying so hard to impress. I lost my period and I started to panic about how that might affect my ability to have biological kids someday. My clothes stopped fitting, which was very frustrating because I’d bought most of them specifically for college. Worst of all (not to be graphic), I would regularly go a week without passing a bowel movement, and when it did come, it was incredibly painful.

The gastrointestinal symptoms I was experiencing as a sophomore were eerily reminiscent of the incident that first motivated me to get a diagnosis the year before. One January night, at 2 in the

morning, I passed out from pain walking back to bed after an attempt to pass one of said horrible bowel movements. My parents heard my body hit the floor and called 911. I woke up to two EMTs asking me who the president was. I re-clasped the bra I was wearing and responded, “It’s summer, the election hasn’t happened yet,” which was the wrong answer.

Joe Biden had not only won the election, he’d already been inaugurated. So, they took me to the hospital, ran an EKG, and hooked me up to an IV. The hospital wasn’t able to do much, and they basically just told me to drink more water and eat my vegetables. I reached out to CAPS the next day and got in contact with a therapist and a nutritionist, who gave me a diagnosis but didn’t do much to help other than recommend I try fruits by making them into smoothies (I hate smoothies.

I have since tried several fruits, but I’ve never had a smoothie because they’re gross. Why are they chunky? Why are they cold? Why are they always a weird color?

I hate them so much). So, I stopped working with both of them after a few sessions, believing there was nothing to be done. I haven’t passed out since, luckily, but there were days it seemed like I might collapse in the shared dorm bathroom, which was not an appealing prospect.

By winter semester of my sophomore year, I felt like I was going crazy. I was eating nine meals a week, seven of which were pizza and two of which were Mojo’s weekend brunch, which was not enough.

I snacked some in my dorm room, but not nearly enough to make up for the 1000+ calories I was missing daily. The social issues I was already beginning to have got worse as the cold weather trapped all of us inside and mass seasonal depression started to sink in. So, I reached out to a Wellness Coach on campus and she connected me with my current therapist, who specializes in eating disorders.

Since working with her, I have easily quadrupled the number of foods I’ll eat and have tried multiple things, including the Olive Garden broccoli, that I’d once sworn I’d go to my grave before trying. In the first few appointments, she had me list all of the foods I ate and rank some I might be willing to try by difficulty. At the end, she would give me a challenge, like to try a particular food before our next appointment and take at least three bites of it. Now we barely talk about food at all because we don’t need to. I try things

organically and independently because (unless it’s pickles), somehow all of the foods that I had ranked as “poisonous” in those first few weeks have moved up to at least the “bad, but won’t kill me” category.

When I say “somehow,” I’m not trying to hide the story from you all. I genuinely don’t know what changed, but I have a couple theories.

The first (and most obvious) one, is that I just got really good at trying things. It wasn’t that the foods became less scary; it was that the action of trying them became habitual. My second theory is that it was the accountability of going to therapy and giving a report every week that did the trick. I live for academic validation and trying foods sort of felt like really challenging homework. My least favorite theory, the one that keeps me up at night, is that my brain simply no longer cares.

My recovery started a month after I first made a plan to kill myself. I didn’t follow through on it, but I still struggle with suicidal ideation every now and again.

Part of me believes that my ARFID was my brain’s maladaptive way of trying to protect me from poison. There’s a reason we call the foods we can eat “safe foods.”

When you have ARFID, it feels like the world will cave in if you try a new food. I don’t know if my brain has simply learned that everything will be okay or if it no longer cares what happens to me.

When I pitched this article, I said I wanted it to be an inspirational retrospective about the time I saw the writing on the wall and made a change, but I think writing that would feel pretty dishonest.

I do think that recovery is possible and I wish that I knew what went down in my brain back in June of 2022, but I don’t.

And even if I did know why my brain has suddenly decided it’s fine with me eating whatever I want, I’m not sure I would recommend that flip to any of you because I’m not entirely sure that it’s rooted in self-love. This might be the eating disorder talking, but I’d rather have ARFID and be happy than handle whatever the world has given me in exchange. Depression makes you skip meals too and that’s just a measly side effect, not even the main danger.

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The Script We Follow: Addressing Abuse in Competitive Robotics

By Anna Nachazel

Content Warning: Abuse, Brief Mention of Gun Violence

I

n November of 2022, a series of damning posts were made on Chief Delphi, an online forum community centered around competitive high school robotics. These posts made accusations against Innovation First International (IFI), a prominent robotics company.

If you ever saw Hexbug commercials on Nickelodeon as a kid, it’s the company that owns all of that. They also own VEX Robotics, one of the two largest competitive robotics leagues in the world, and sponsored some of the most prominent, successful teams in the other largest league, FIRST, including my team. Almost all of my merchandise from the four years that I spent doing high school robotics has an IFI logo on it. I bought a #TeamIFI sweatshirt that had all the logos of the teams they sponsored. One of my best friends wore an IFI bandana for every playoff match we ever had. So, you can only imagine my shock reading reports of sexual harassment, gun violence, and death threats made by company executives. Only I wasn’t shocked, because it just sounded like my own experience with robotics scaled up.

The story the posts tell is pretty simple. Tony Norman, the former CEO

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and Co-Founder of IFI, is a piece of shit who overworked and abused his employees, many of whom were quite young at the time. IFI in many posts is compared to a fraternity. In the early 2010s, they decided to hire dozens of interns to use for cheap labor (Trzaskos). The company built these interns a large house not far from their headquarters to live in. One employee who was present when the blueprints were released wrote that they remembered “hearing comments about how great the parties there would be, how much alcohol they could store, and the best places to play beer pong” (Yznaga). Interns were also often invited to party with top execs, including Norman, and told that they were unlikely to advance in the company if they did not (Glick).

These parties were held under “the watchful eye of paid, off-duty county sheriffs who made sure nothing ‘got out of hand,’” but employees still report that partygoers frequently mishandled guns and fireworks and were pressured to drink with Norman’s high-school-aged children and their friends (Glick). In general, the company culture around guns was startlingly irresponsible, even for a Texan business. Chuck Glick, a former employee of IFI and 2011 VEX robotics mentor of the year,

alleged that he was threatened at gunpoint by an executive and that Norman made death threats against him and a coworker multiple times.

IFI was also accused in multiple posts of fostering an unsafe environment for their female employees. This seems incredibly hypocritical considering the work they have done through their subsidiary VEX on Girl Powered, an initiative meant to help recruit girls into competitive robotics and STEM in general. One post alleges that at least one female intern “was approached by 3 different executives, and her own boss, about how it would be beneficial for her to go out to dinner alone with Tony [Norman]” (Trzaskos). A post on another robotics forum, G2M (Greatest 2 Minutes, the length of a robotics match), by a former employee alleges that the president of one of IFI’s subsidiaries, Rack Solutions, had attempted to recruit her to be his “sexy little assistant” (Crabtree). In this same post, the employee states that Tony Norman, who had been a friend of her late mother’s, laughed when someone said “I just know her mom would hate who she’s become” to the employee’s face.

IFI posted a response to all of the accusations made about them on November 15th of 2022. It’s almost comically out of touch. The first sentence reads: “By no means are we attempting to minimize an individual’s experience, but we are at a loss to understand why several employees who left our company as far back as 2016 would suddenly decide to begin posting negative comments now” (IFI). This line shows a deep misunderstanding of trauma. Multiple employees ended their posts by saying that they’d been afraid to say anything for years because IFI might’ve retaliated or simply because they were working through all of their emotions about their time with the company. It is very normal for survivors to need time and support to come to terms with what happened and be ready to speak about it. IFI then goes on to say that their human resources department, which nearly every post I read discounted as ineffectual and enabling of abuse, has “written policies regarding issues such as sexual harassment, intimidation or retaliation” (IFI). Personally, I’m less interested in the policies that were written than I am in those that were actually enforced. They follow that lovely statement up by reminding readers that “multiple women hold senior leadership roles throughout [their] organization,” which feels somewhat tokenizing and also seems to suggest that women never enable abuse, which is quite naive (IFI).

At the beginning of this essay, I made the statement that when I first read all of these posts, I wasn’t surprised. That may seem crazy to readers unfamiliar with the world of competitive robotics. I read two paragraphs of Chuck Glick’s post to one of my roommates and they were absolutely floored by it, which is a pretty reasonable reaction to have. The things that these employees went through were horrifying, but to me, they felt conceptually familiar.

Any time that I talk about my experience with high school robotics, I always make sure to flag how grateful I am for the good people that I met and how much more tolerable they made my experience on the team. In their otherwise damning posts about IFI, Amy Yznaga, Chuck Glick, and Jay Trzaskos all thank the people who supported them.

Their rhetorical techniques feel so similar to the ones I employ when presenting my own story. It’s almost like we’re all working off the same outline.

First, I flag that some people were good, so I can’t be accused of being bitter and ungrateful, but also because it’s true. Even though they didn’t stop the abuse, several of the adults on my team were nothing but kind to me and even offered support and I don’t want to lump them in with the rest. Once I make it clear that some people were merely enablers, I tell people about the questionable culture my team had around drugs and alcohol. Mentors frequently came back to the hotels we stayed at drunk, especially in the off-season. Usually, they went straight to bed and avoided the students, but not always. In my four years on the team, I saw multiple of my mentors drunk and even more hungover. Then I talk about safety, a concept we treated like a joke. Sure I never had a

gun pointed at my back, but I watched one of my best friends, a 17-yearold boy, accidentally cut a gash in his hand that had to have been two inches long and a quarter of an inch deep because he’d been improperly using a drill right in front of multiple mentors. Instead of taking him to the hospital or urgent care to get stitches, one of our mentors cleaned it out with rubbing alcohol and then used Loctite superglue to stick the flesh back together. My friend, after we got him a piece of pizza and a Mountain Dew, just kept on working. My freshman year, another kid chopped off the edge of her pinky on a bandsaw and we decided it would be fun to keep an injury counter on the big whiteboard in the shop. For an injury to qualify, it had to draw blood or tears. We easily hit at least 30 tallies every season.

Then I go into all of the inappropriate relationships the team enabled.

From ages 13 to 17, a good amount of my best friends were 25+ year old men. As a top member of the team, I was often the only girl or woman in the shop late into the night, which isn’t inherently bad but did make me uncomfortable at times. We also had some problems arise when students graduated, went to a local college, and decided to continue working with the team as mentors. None of us ever knew how to navigate interacting with someone who had been our peer and friend the previous year and had suddenly become an adult and mentor.

It didn’t feel wrong to make inappropriate jokes with someone a year older than us, but what about two years or three or four? We never knew where to draw the line. One of our younger mentors who had been a student on another team before moving to Michigan to work in the auto-industry was notorious for telling us students about his sexual exploits and listening in when the older students talked about their own.

Then I’ll describe the strange dynamics around labor. All of our mentors were volunteers and students obviously weren’t employees either. No one got paid but we all worked our asses off for weeks. Like the interns at IFI, the students would get yelled at for going on their phones, talking about off-topic matters, or (my personal favorite) sitting down in the shop. I tracked the hours I put in each week of build season my senior year and the average was 54, which is more than some full time jobs. Honestly, a lot of my time at robotics did feel like work and not an extracurricular. We worked out of a corporate engineering building, had a lunch break, and, though we weren’t required to clock in and out, people paid attention to how many hours you put in and “promotions” would be determined by your hours and your performance in the shop.

Normally, I don’t even bother bringing up the racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes and statements that were constantly flung across the shop. But, I’ll mention one story here. My freshman year, our lead mentor told me and my friend, the only out queer guy on the team, that “it’s okay to be weak and girly, as long as you’re a girl.” It was an unsubtle jab at my friend who had, a minute before, been struggling to connect the shop air hose to our pneumatic riveter. For context, our air hose was notoriously finicky. It didn’t just take strength to connect it, it took practice and a little bit of luck. I saw plenty of guys in their junior or senior years, and even some mentors, take a couple tries to get it to connect.

Next, I’ll talk about the girl-on-girl violence that team leadership encouraged. In FRC, three to four students (the Drive Team) typically interact with and drive their team’s robot during a match, and another four to five (the Pit Crew) repair and prep the robot between matches.

When I say several of us would’ve killed to make either team, I’m only a little kidding. I worked myself halfway mad my junior year to make Pit Crew. I was one of two girls on the subteam that year and midway through our season, I was approached by a mentor and told that there would be a bit of a race between me and the other girl to make the Drive Team the next year. You see, they only ever put one girl on the Drive Team. If you didn’t have any girls in leadership, some people in the league would accuse your team of being sexist, so you had to throw in a token girl. After a year of sabotaging each other, talking shit,

29

and competing over the same guy (who didn’t like either of us), I was, reluctantly, given the position by team leadership. Our student captain told me that they hesitated to give it to me because I was too emotional to be any good at it. I was “too emotional” to drop wiffle balls onto the field at the right time. But they gave it to me anyway, out of generosity (and because the other girl had started therapy, a signal of weakness).

Finally, I finish with the kicker. My team was among the more famous ones. We were one of less than a hundred original teams in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) league and at one point we had more career wins than any of the other 3,000+ teams. I’ve been recognized on campus at U of M for my affiliation with the team. It wasn’t even like I was wearing a team shirt or something, they knew my face and that I had been on the drive team my senior year. The lead mentor of my team also decided to give us one of the most obnoxious possible team colors (Pantone 123C aka “Bad Boy Yellow”) so that we’d be easy to spot at competitions and would pop in photographs. We were very well known, to the point where if I told just about any random FRC kid the team number, they would recognize it. We were also very hated. There was a Snapchat group with members from multiple teams dedicated to hating us. Someone even edited all of our worst competition moments into a video and posted it online.

Being a popular team comes with more serious consequences than petty, silly hate, however. As far back as I remember, we had a fanboy.

I’ll call him Ricky, for anonymity’s sake. Ricky would show up to competitions in our gear, despite being a part of another team. People would come up to me and ask who he was, assuming he was my teammate and I knew him, but he mostly avoided us, until he didn’t.

In my junior year, Ricky stalked one of my close friends. He sent her creepy Instagram DMs and followed her around at competitions, much to her discomfort. In my senior year, we had a new mentor: Ricky. The girls on the team spoke about it and we decided to monitor him for the first few weeks and see how he behaved, especially around the girl he stalked. When I first introduced myself to him, it went like this.

Me: Hi, I’m Anna by the way.

Ricky: Yes, I know. Anna Nachazel. You won Dean’s List (FRC’s student(s) of the year award) at states last year.

That probably doesn’t sound too weird. Maybe another mentor had mentioned me to him or something. Maybe he was even at the competition where I won the award and he remembered my name.

But, my last name is Czech and very rare in America. Even I pronounce it wrong, according to my grandpa. I say it as “knock-hazel” for the record. At the competition where I won Dean’s List, the announcer said it as “Nuh-chez-ehl” and the whole team decided to call me “Chez” and only pronounce my name in that way because they thought it was so funny. But, somehow, when Ricky said my name, he got it right. For clarity, I know that pronouncing a last name right is not a bad thing, it just felt a bit unnerving given what I knew about him and the context of the situation.

Over time, the girls on the team noticed a trend. Ricky liked to talk about his personal life and chastely but frequently touch the arms and backs of all of the girls on the team that weren’t freshmen and didn’t have boyfriends. I respect him for leaving the 14-year-olds alone if nothing else. I should also include that, at the time, Ricky was a sophomore or junior (I can’t quite remember) at U of M. He lived in Ann Arbor but commuted an hour three to five days a week to come to our robotics meetings. He was very committed.

After a few too many awkward conversations and lingering touches, I told one of the younger mentors on the team, who had been a student with me, about the issue. He suggested that I tell our lead mentor. So, I, along with the girl he stalked and the girl on the team who I was

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actively competing over the Drive Team position with, brought it up to him. He said that he didn’t want to punish someone for being socially awkward and that he would talk to Ricky, but to tell him if something bad ever happened. It was an incredibly invalidating, frustrating experience because all I heard when he said that was that we were cannon fodder. Being on our team wasn’t, or at least it shouldn’t have been, a right Ricky was owed. How is it worse to suspend him or kick him off than to make a large chunk of your female students feel even more uncomfortable in an already male-dominated space or even to potentially endanger them if their instincts proved right?

The one thing our lead mentor actually did was talk to Ricky, which actually made things worse for us. He stopped telling us about his personal life, but would frequently and loudly complain about how the three of us who had reported him unfairly hated him and made him feel unwelcome.

Ricky is still on the team. I wrote a letter to our top five or so mentors as a college sophomore detailing my complaints. It didn’t matter. I was gone and away at school so my voice mattered even less than it had when I was on the team. Like IFI, they wondered why I hadn’t brought it up sooner.

I have very complicated feelings about my time in competitive robotics.

It wasn’t outright traumatizing to the same extent as the IFI employee’s experience, but I find myself very inclined to believe the horrible things they report because they seem similar in theme to my own experiences in that sub-culture. The issues with IFI didn’t arise in a vacuum. They were supported by an existing hyper-competitive, hyper-masculine culture that devalues safety and teaches kids that working in a shop 54 hours a week on top of their full school load for no pay is an amazing opportunity for their futures. Many of the interns who raised concerns about IFI were former FRC and VEX students who not only had the skills IFI was looking for, but also had on the “job” experience being mistreated by people who were supposed to protect them.

Dean Kamen, the founder of FIRST Robotics, gives a speech every year at the FRC world championship. It’s more or less the same every year. I’ve seen three of them and an extra fourth and fifth speech when he stopped in to watch the Michigan State Championship. He halfdrunkenly talks about the growth the league has seen over the years, babbles about the “FIRST Values” of Gracious Professionalism and “Coopertition” (Cooperation + Competition), goes on a tangent no one understands, and begs corporations for even more money. This league is amazing, he tells the crowd, because “this is the only sport where every kid can go pro.” He’s right, to some extent. Every year, alumni from my team would get amazing engineering jobs and internships, some of them even worked for robotics companies like IFI and that kind of terrifies me. At the time, I loved being on the robotics team. It was my life, my whole identity. But now, I look back and I’m horrified by my own actions, the actions of those around me, and most of all by the years I spent recruiting high school freshmen for the team. I wish I had seen the warning flags earlier, then maybe I wouldn’t feel so much guilt.

They were right in front of my face, in bright Bad Boy Yellow.

Works Cited 1. Crabtree, M. (n.d.). [cw: Sexual harrasment] Dan Mantz and Tony Norman Sexually Harassed Me. https://www.theg2m.com/t/cw-sexual-harrasment-dan-mantz-and-tony-norman-sexually-harassed-me/539 2. Glick, Chuck. (n.d.). [cw: Violence, sexual harassment] IFI - A Toxic and Predatory Workplace in Edtech. https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/cw-violence-sexual-harassment-ifi-a-toxic-and-predatory-workplace-in-edtech/417760 3. IFI/VEX Response. (n.d.). https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/ifi-vex-response/417791/1 4. Trazkos, J. (n.d.). [cw: Sexual harrasment] An Open Letter to Vex. https://www.chiefdelphi. com/t/cw-sexual-harassment-an-open-letter-to-vex/416929/236 5. Yznaga, A. (n.d.). [Cw: SI/SH, substance abuse, sexual harassment]—How I was Abused by 148, 6. IFI, and Grant Cox. https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/cw-si-sh-substance-abuse-sexual-harassmenthow-i-was-abused-by-148-ifi-and-grant-cox/418327

GAUZE

FOR AN

OPEN WOUND

By Elizabeth Wolfe Content Warning: Blood, Sexual Content

Am I bleeding enough for you?

There is so much to bear,

Knees wobbling, childbirth in reverse,

so much I bare for you, praying it's enough.

I'm praying for reverence.

Don't be an intruder.

The dawn of time rests in the apex of my creation.

Tell me I'm doing good.

Would you believe me if I told you

Still, I'm looking for an opening, a way to ask you to be gentle with me.

this was my first time?

I was born scared,

Do you fit?

Will you fit?

walls too thick to penetrate.

Make room in my body

Can I make you fit?

Something is wrong with me

to hide inside, to make me whole, to fill the hole God left in me.

if I cannot hold you inside.

My mother said this is worth it,

I was told He made it for you, so I'll bleed myself dry,

wrappers of failed attempts littered at my feet.

a flood to renew this place, for you to belong in me.

31

THE WALLS OF THE ROOM

MY

BRAIN RESTS “You’ve won a $50 gift card for the best dorm room!” the email informed me. A housing department contest I’d offhandedly entered had shockingly yielded a real award, despite my noticeable lack of Dormify wallpaper, Michigan sports posters, or Urban Outfitters accent pieces. In fact, most things in my dorm cost less than a dollar or two. My dorm was a mismatched, yet meticulously curated, quilt of objects people rid from their home during spring cleaning, after death, and while clearing out cabinets. While many college dorms are stuffed with soon-to-be-discarded Shein tops that cost a few dollars, mine was littered with frames, crocheted blankets, and lighting that hailed from the local thrift shop or my grandmother’s basement. My magnum opus, however, was a single wall, on which I had pasted bits and pieces of my values, memories, and evidence of my ritualistic tendencies, encoded in printer ink and developed before I was born. This wall did more than win me $50, though; it forced me to inspect myself socially.

Moving to college was great in some of the ways my adult mentors said it would be. Since middle school, adults had told me I was ready for college—my parents, my grandparents, my teachers, my therapist, even various adults I briefly spoke to through miscellaneous extracurricular activities. I packed my childhood room up into boxes hopefully, thinking my social frustration had expired at age 18. Though I’ve not confirmed it, I think this is a common sentiment among late-diagnosed (selfdiagnosed and medically diagnosed alike) autistic women and gender-diverse people. When you grow up without the words or ideas to confirm that social ableism is responsible for writing the grading criteria that renders you a C+ student in your social life, it seems as though being dropped in a different place might change it all. To find that this is not the case, and that moving to college does not completely protect you from social exclusion, is profoundly sobering.

I see why my parents painted the college transition so hopefully. My mom attended Catholic school her whole life before coming to the University of Michigan. The closest city to the farm my dad grew up on was home to just 406 people

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IN

in 1980. When I imagine the place he grew up in, I think of the local student who drowned in a grain silo and the 10-person crosscountry team photo that hangs in the local pizza restaurant. The city

By Tess C has shrunk since his salutatorianmarked high school graduation in the mid-80s. When I recall the wild things I’ve heard in my time at U of M, I think about the kid I met who founded a multi-million dollar company and another student who owns a year of in-state tuition’s worth of designer bags. I imagine my parents had some similar difficulties, growing up in a minimally politically diverse place as I had. The University of Michigan undoubtedly introduced my parents to ideas and people different from the communities in which they were raised. But now, considering how they recall their experiences, I realize there was something different about my supposed “college readiness.” In my lowest points in high school, it seemed to be a comforting promise that I was ready to simply move past the difficulties that the social climate of public high school presented me with. I wanted to fundraise for sustainable period products and go to U of M guest lectures open to the public. I spent my COVID year sewing masks for a local sewing corp and painting quietly in my room. Keeping to myself was not nearly as difficult for me as it was for my peers, who sat in their trunks in the school parking lot, organized small parties, and FaceTimed for hours a day. I felt like I should fear missing out, but the more I consider it, that was the most peaceful year of my life in a variety of ways. My room was an old, but newly-discovered, pocket of creativity for me as I persisted through the last years of high school. It was then that I started sticking letters to my wall, along with postcards and a few pages of old books. A pair of bagged doll hands that hung next to the light switch made my dad smile when he commented that I should sleep and switched off the light.

While my hometown was filled with talk of sports games and resistance to progressive social justice movements, Ann Arbor was filled with other people who populated their

farmers’ markets with jewelry, Middle Eastern foods, and kombucha. This is not to say that Ann Arbor’s interests are more developed than my hometown’s. This is an important distinction. They are just different. Making friends at my high school often felt like trying to make friends with people who couldn’t understand me if they tried, which I felt they often didn’t. While students responded to other kids’ points in AP Government class discussions, my contributions about how conservative rhetoric around gun violence unfairly scapegoated disabled people or why period poverty is a national threat to education and public health were met with crickets. My lack of attention paid to social norms led to me voice opinions about gun control in the same room as a student who told me his father owned an AR-15. When an adult told me it was “brave” to present to my high school freshman biology class about period poverty’s effect on educational equity, I really just didn’t get it.

Here, though, in Ann Arbor, engineers were artists. People who read a lot were invited to parties. People were in bands… and that was cool. Raising bees and making your own jam were hobbies that cool people did in Ann Arbor.

People seemed to be stretching across social groups, ebbing and flowing smoothly between hockey practice and weekly crochet circles. Oddly, the things that made me distant from my peers in high school made me more interesting to classmates in college. There were clubs related to things that I got made fun of for talking about in middle school social studies classes, like feminism, Queer community,

and medical racism. Still, I felt that there was some sort of large glass block anchored between me and the people I wanted to be friends with. When I got too close, the glass would fog, obstructing my ability to read the situation. In my social nervousness, my breath met the clear barrier and turned it thick and opaque, like the Nubio glass bricks that allow light into my grandparents’ first-floor bathroom, but made it impossible to look in or out. I’d miss a cue, say the wrong thing, or silently abandon a social gathering because the amount of people and noise overwhelmed me. My first freshman year friends would say I was “loading” when someone would try to talk to me at a loud social gathering and I struggled to respond in a neuronormative time period. After many instances of blurred social attempts, the glass seemed permanently murky. Dust settled on the condensation and dried there. I squinted and tried to find my way around the block, but it snaked its way from my hometown all the way to Ann Arbor, rendering me close, but not quite friends, with the people that adults had promised would provide relief from years of chronic social mishaps.

It was during the dark months of winter break that I first started collaging. What began in a small journal bloomed across my walls, filling my room with intricately cut papers from books that people had thrown away or donated to the thrift shop I worked at. It was a ritual of sorts, peeking between encyclopedias and Bibles for botanical guides and 1980s middle school-level anatomy books. While my early rituals had been exposure therapied out of me, this one evoked a sense of stillness instead of a terrorizing state. I

33

34

eventually stopped bending down to find the books, and instead completely rested on the ground as I sorted and peered. Maybe you’re not supposed to sit on the dusty floor of a Salvation Army in your late teen years. Maybe you’re supposed to spend school breaks at home strengthening friendships that survived the move to college, not sitting on a living room floor finding more solace in hours cutting up books. While the ice spread invisibly over the parking lot outside my old teammates’ apartment, wide-eyed flying squirrels, photographs from the Troubles, and maps that warped as the marked year changed scattered across the floor. I clipped and cropped, glued and mended together an assortment of foggy feelings. I spent most of those two weeks working in the back of the thrift shop, driving to Ypsi, and sitting on that first-floor apartment carpeting, thinking and repeating the same fine motor movements with the green scissors I’d somehow kept track of for nearly a decade.

I came back from break with hundreds of collage cutouts.

The small journal where my collages had previously lived was filling up, unable to lie flat. My ideas were bigger than what the little journal could hold, so I took to the walls. Whole pages of dark woods and a spider web clip covering a corner, which framed an intricate cutout of an equine musculoskeletal system, gave way to a menagerie, conservatory, and personal history book on the wall. A large anatomical close-up of a common house fly, short phrases cut from books, saint prayer cards, and silent rabbits (many rabbits) shielded me from the impassive beige walls of my dorm. Though my room was ornamented like a Baroque tune, with small things I had picked up here and there from work, it was apparent that the collage wall caught more people’s attention than my other art, plants, and books.

My roommate’s friends curiously catechized me about its makeup. Some wanted to take pictures of them posing in front of it. Hall neighbors noticed it when I slipped in after class, asking about where I found everything. Pride simmered in me whenever someone took a few silent moments to take it in, as some people didn’t necessarily appreciate the close-ups of scaly animals, hairy arachnid legs, and aged photographs. It felt a bit vulnerable to show people a huge culmination of fragmented things that represented great importance to me. If they asked about a single piece, I’d tell them exactly why it stood out to me, whether I wanted to or not. My compulsory truthfulness, sometimes seen as oversharing, often stabbed me in the back socially. But now, this trait led to a form of reflection.

My wall became a mirror I glued together from little shards of my life, almost unknowingly. I began to understand that the wall’s parts were things that made me think deeply at night when I nodded off—or sparked conversation with someone who was transitioning from stranger to acquaintance, more rarely acquaintance to friend, or seldomly, friend to confidant.

Instead of thinking “She’s not interested” when I divert my gaze while talking to you, look to the wall’s shark, whose own eyes are of great physiological interest, the way the eyelids never envelop their full oculi. I’ll be looking at the

firm, alert gaze of a black-and-white rabbit photo with the word “royalty” pasted next to it. When you see the little rubber doll hands encapsulated in packaging from the 60s, you may think it’s creepy to keep doll parts thumbtacked to the wall. But ask about it, and I will tell you it’s one of the only remnants I have from my late grandparents’ farmhouse. The graveyard photograph may seem morbid, something you’d rather not see on a daily basis. However, death and existence are common special interests in autistic culture. When I scan the stones, I can still feel the warmth in my 11-year-old body while standing side by side with my grandfather, looking over his mother-in-law’s grave that read, “Let perpetual light shine upon them.” Understanding and accepting the things we cannot change is empowering, whether it be our neurotypes or their eventual dissolution into whatever comes when we leave our loved ones on earth, remaining only in memories and a singular marked stone among many more.

My mom has told me over and over, “Actions speak louder than words,” when people who said they were my friends satirized me. Pictures, overlapped and complementing each other, speak words, record actions, and evoke feelings far gone into personal histories. What stories I struggle to show through the fog of social ableism that surrounds all of us are not hidden away or inaccessible— they are just worth the wait for the fog to lift. Hold your breath for just a few seconds. Take it in. Pictures speak louder than words.

When you admire the picture of my wall sent by the Residence Housing Association newsletter, you admire parts of me that, in practice, may be considered cringey.

When you applaud my chronicle commitment, you praise hyperfixation and special interests that, if applied to different, more archetypal autistic interests, become stigmatized social behaviors. What I can say now is that when people fail to think past their first societally-sculpted impressions of the behaviorally “odd,” they are the ones fogging the glass, creating the moisture that causes the collages to peel from my unairconditioned room during the summer.

35

By Sydney Sweeney

36

I

“My A W In o

t started with a nag. Small, insistent, harboring in the back of my head and the pit of my stomach. It sunk my chest to the ground like I was lying beneath an anvil, flashed like the brightest light bulb in my dim mind, and sometimes, lingered so silently that I’d forget it was even there. I used to get it confused with another feeling I was unfamiliar with, which I now know to be anxiety, but with time, I developed a better understanding of this strange feeling that existed within me. I came to recognize anxiety as the face of doubt, and this other feeling as the face of knowing. It slowly became the map of how I steer my life, and I’ve found that it resembles a traffic light, blinking green when telling me to make those leaps, bounds, and life-changing decisions, blinking red when alerting me not to n, itio tu n’s Intuition, trust certain people, saving a m my friends and me from scary situations, and blinking is an yellow when warning incredible me to proceed with thing.” caution in unfamiliar environments or situations.

I’ve had a lot of personal experience with intuition, along with many other women in my life, but when I decided to write on this topic, I realized that I’d never looked into the science of it before—is this a concept that can be explained by psychology and medicine? I turned to science to see what I could uncover. Merriam-Webster defines intuition as “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.”

It’s the ability humans, not just women, have and use as a guiding light, typically in situations of decision-making.

Although both men and women have the ability to tap into this mindset, it’s most closely associated with women due to other psychological traits that are most prevalent in women, like empathy. Empathy and intuition have often been linked together in the realm of psychology (Orlaff, 2022). According to a recent study by the University of Cambridge, women have higher cognitive empathy than men (Block, 2023).

We have the ability to detect, feel, and immediately know more about the people, the vibe, and the tone when first stepping into a room. Women’s experiences with empathy are what allow us to act on feelings of intuition more often than men, which is further explained in the 2008 British Journal of Psychology. The journal reads that intuition is “what happens when the brain draws on past experiences and external cues to make decisions.” According to Judith Orloff M.D., there are neurotransmitters in the gut, similar to those we have in our brains, that are also able to respond to “environmental stimuli and emotions”(Oakley). This is what we refer to as a “gut feeling.” So, in summary, scientists define and explain intuition as a mix of various psychological and physical responses to situations that happen to us and that we find ourselves in—these responses can include quick evaluations of situations, reading people’s emotions, and the internal measurement of uncomfortableness. While this study explains much of what lies within the mind and body when intuition kicks in, does it explain all of the crazy ways in which a woman’s intuition manifests itself?

I will never forget the day my mom told me about a time her intuition kicked in, giving her a glimpse of what was to come.

In high school, her family’s close friends and next-door neighbors announced their pregnancy, but my mom already knew. No one had told her before, she had no prior insinuation that her neighbor was pregnant, but when my grandma came up to her room to ask her if she had heard the news, my mom immediately knew. No hesitation, no second-guess, she just knew. Nowadays, it’s harder for her to recall the specific details of the story, but she says she’ll never forget the feeling that came over her when she knew what the news was. Experiences like hers are far from uncommon—within her life, within my life, and within many women’s lives. When I first met some of my college friends, we had a long-running joke that I had “spidey senses”— intuitively knowing when a boy was going to text a friend back, calling out sketchy characters before they showed their true colors. I’ve always known when something has gone wrong before I’m told; I can call out a bluff three days before someone tries, and I know the moment my friends start secret relationships with people. A friend of a friend was supposed to catch a specific train in Chicago, but something stopped her in her tracks, compelling her to take a different one.

That something saved her, and she avoided a horrific attack on her usual fellow commuters at the stop she originally planned to get off at. There is something deep and innate in a woman’s ability to know what to do and not do. Despite the various studies and scientific facts explaining to us how intuition works, I believe that science itself cannot fully explain the moments in which a woman’s intuition takes over and the different ways that intuition can present itself to us.

To me, there is something almost supernatural about it, something that also exists in the reason why people can psychologically, emotionally, and psychically heal from ailments after walking barefoot in grass, or why people believe soulmates and twin flames exist (Sharma, 2023).

Maybe one day, far in the future, when we make further advancements in technology, we’ll reach a realm of understanding that can explain this feeling in its entirety.

But for now, I’ll stick with the idea that women are in tune and incredible, that we are able to do things that others cannot…and, that we might also be a little witchy.

Works Cited Block, D. (2023, January 23). Are women more empathetic than men?. Voice of America.

Hodgkinson, G.P., Langan-Fox, J. and Sadler-Smith, E. (2008), Intuition: A fundamental bridging construct in the behavioural sciences. British Journal of Psychology, 99: 1-27.

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Intuition definition & meaning. Merriam-Webster.

Orloff, J. (2022, October 28). Is there a difference between intuition and being an empath?. Judith Orloff MD. Oakley, C. (n.d.). The power of female intuition. WebMD. Sharma, S. (2023, March 28). Walk barefoot on grass every day and unleash these 7 health benefits. Onlymyhealth.

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R A V F Y M SI L

G

A R ST G H T

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By Liv Schafer

Content Warning: Disordered Eating, Homophobia

W

hen you’re starving yourself, you spend a lot of time thinking about food—coveting it on other people’s plates, planning your next meal, evaluating calories, macros, fiber. During the worst of my binge eating disorder, I never thought about how hungry I was, even though I spent the majority of each day with an empty stomach. All I thought about was food. I lived hunger instead of feeling it—unable to recognize it in the mirror or in the brief glimpse I got of my reflection in the toilet bowl water before closing the lid, frustrated that my stomach was clinging to what I’d funneled in. To be fair, it’s hard to feel hunger, or anything else for that matter, when you’re consumed by guilt and shame. Instagram graphics that advised viewers to “listen to your body” in swirly, condescending letters certainly would’ve been more helpful if I could’ve heard what my body was saying over my father’s voice at the dinner table or the shouting in my head: “Clean your plate, never ask for more. Be grateful, never greedy.”

While we are born with hunger and desire–innate, primal urges–guilt and shame are taught to us, passed down like cursed heirlooms by people with the best! intentions! When I was young, they took the shape of offhanded observations about my body made by older female relativesfriendsteachersstrangersatchurch and conversations overheard in the Target dressing room about looking “so skinny in that dress!” that made me feel like the stall walls were closing in on me—that were immediately and forever cataloged in my brain under the tab:{things people notice about you that must therefore be vigilantly maintained in order to gain their approval}. These items accumulate rather quickly, as most women are painfully aware, but at the top of my list (and I fear, at the top of many others’ lists) was the shape of my body. I became obsessed with the “extra” flesh I had and all the places it lurked. Nothing was more important to me than removing it, the most tangible of my flaws and thus the easiest to target.

Somehow the harmless, innocent cells that clung to my teenage body became the source of shame, flushing through me whenever my waistband felt too tight, and guilt, choking me every time I went back for seconds.

The two played tetherball with my mind every day until I was dizzy (or was that just my low blood sugar?).

I am a woman, and women grow up starved. To be loved we must keep ourselves empty, leave room for male validation and the occasional taste of agency they reward us with when we’re too pretty (read: busy performing our gender) to be dangerous. The hunger

we are born with is a wild thing, too ravenous to let loose in a world that condemns it. So we learn to tame our hunger like you would a wolf, cultivate it as if it were a plant on your windowsill. My 17-year-old self was convinced that if her hunger would just sit quietly, patiently in the corner with its hands folded like a good girl, she could make it to 5 pm without eating anything.

Maybe then I would deserve the food I ate, though it never felt that way when my binge sat heavy in my stomach afterward, sinking me into a pool of guilt I would wallow in for the rest of the night. All of my needs felt like selfish wants. The delight of biting into a warm, crisp bagel, the smooth cream cheese melting on my tongue, was a luxury I hadn’t earned. In my fantasies, I would eat guilt-free when I was “skinny,” a conveniently subjective goal that remained forever unrealized. Enough was a foreign concept—being, having, doing, all of the above. I won homecoming queen on a dark and rainy Friday night, and when they called my name my stomach was growling—empty as the rest of me. All I wanted was to look good in my dress.

I am a woman, and women grow up starved.

I think a lot of us live in third person. Seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, the art of beholding a woman, is a lesson we learn young, usually around the same time a Barbie doll is thrust into our eager hands. She is an object, nothing more than the sum of her parts, which we are meant to judge against an incredibly specific standard. We are fed images of feminine beauty everywhere we look—of the Barbie variety—and we’re expected to swallow this ideal without a second thought. As a culture, we worship it and the women who fulfill it with a fervor I could never quite conjure when I was seven and kneeling in the pews on Sundays. God must not know Victoria’s secret.

Slender bodies with taut skin taunted me from the television screen, telling me I wanted them. And oh, did I want them.

Part of the reason it takes so long for so many girls to realize they like girls like that is because of how

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ingrained the spectacle of feminine beauty is in our everyday lives. Female bodies are so sexualized in the media that we are desensitized to how crude these depictions are. We view women through men’s eyes and the tenderness of our own appreciation is lost, overpowered by the urgency of the worldwide beauty pageant we’re entered in at birth. To be socialized as a woman is to become a student of what’s expected of you, so when my gaze lingered on the women in cosmetics commercials, I didn’t recognize the attraction I felt. I was too busy internalizing the message that my jawlinehairlinewaistline should be as flawless as theirs.

To view your most basic, human urges as your greatest weaknesses is to uncouple your priorities from your needs. Entirely.

To be or to have? I raise you, Shakespeare. When I wasn’t thinking about food, I was looking at the girls around me. Sizing them up? Comparing myself?

Yes, always. But knowing what I know now, I may have become slightly over-practiced in admiring the feminine form. The workout influencers that flooded my social media were ideals, but in identifying that I admired their bodies I somehow ignored the subtler issue of how exactly I rationalized being drawn to them. My hunger may simply have been too literal to grapple with metaphorically. Or perhaps I first needed to expel the heterosexual propaganda being shoved down my throat (every time someone asked me “So when are you getting a boyfriend?” added two weeks to my stay in the closet). Maybe I could’ve admitted that yes, the girls I spent all of lacrosse practice staring at were really cool and pretty and funny and smart and maybe being obsessed with them is called having a crush. Teasing apart my desire for beauty and acceptance from the desires awakening with my sexuality was too delicate a task, especially when both longings were so urgent.

So I stayed hungry. For I am a woman, and women grow up starved. It was all too natural to subdue my appetite for what I couldn’t want. Women are punished for wanting, so much that we end up punishing ourselves. Why be called bossy-selfish-

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vain-uptight when you could just be quiet? Why tell someone your needs when those are obviously unreasonable expectations, sweetheart? Why eat the last cookie when they could just feed it to the pigs?

You’re not a pig, are you? Are you? I had already exiled my hunger to where it couldn’t reach me, so the state of cognitive dissonance that arose from ignoring my queerness was easy to maintain. Especially when the alternative was to embrace my sexuality for all that it was while knowing that my close-minded peers would not be able to do the same. After running from shame my whole life, that was a reality I couldn’t face.

It hurts to know that I lived inside myself for so long, barely subsisting on the empty calories of rice cakes and validation. I so desperately wanted to fit—into my clothes from freshman year, into my place in our family portraits, into my white, Christian, suburban town. With no room for the rest of me (why were the best parts extra?), it’s no wonder I felt so damn claustrophobic all the time. I didn’t have the space to exist. To view your most basic, human urges as your greatest weaknesses is to uncouple your priorities from your needs. Entirely.

I know I am far from the only woman or person to have experienced this. I mourn the months, years, lifetimes collectively spent fighting the beast that is hunger. Fundamentally, it feels wrong to look that beast in the eyes and see that really, it’s just… you.

Desperation, passion, and desire are stolen from us when we’re told we’re not enough, and those feelings become so foreign that they terrify us when they get too close. None are worth fearing though, and only the anger I now feel at realizing how long I let others decide what I deserve has allowed me to accept my inherent worth. To reiterate: be angry. At anyone but yourself. Stomp and yell and demand what you deserve. Suffering isn’t valiant, or beautiful. (But female rage is. Don’t lie, I know you’ve seen the TikTok montages.)

The real beauty is in realizing that, maladaptive as conflating my relationship with food with my sexuality might have been, eating chocolate and kissing girls are two of the greatest pleasures in life, so maybe I didn’t have it all wrong. And I’m happy to report that— finally—they’re anything but guilty.

You Should Probably Leave

By Nia Saxon

It didn’t hit me all at once. Instead, it built in me slowly, achingly, over twenty-one years.

At first, it was just a whisper in the trees up Huron Parkway.

You should probably leave. It was the road I had driven up and down since fourth grade. My elementary, middle, and high school were all strung together by concrete and cars. From my house all the way to the north side of town. A Rite Aid, Little Caesars, gas stations, and a Barnes and Noble give way to trees, lining both sides of the road. Trees give way to a golf course that gives way to a bridge that crosses the Huron River to my high school. Past that more trees, with my mom’s old neighborhood in between. At the end of it is my first job (never work at a pet store), schools, and my mom’s work. The little ghosts of me were everywhere. Just watching from the trees, whispering.

Almost unintelligible. They went silent for a while after that.

Then, I heard it in the hallways at school. You should probably leave, flashing like a billboard at the top of each college application. You should probably leave, humming softly under my dad’s questions about where I wanted to go to school, softly urging me to leave for another place. I ignored it though, and it felt right at the time. That didn’t mean it went away.

It came to me again at U of M. You should probably leave, pressing in the eyes of the students who ask me where I’m from. You should probably leave, flowing in the undercurrent of professors’ advice for graduation. I started seeing myself everywhere I went. Crisler, where my dad took my brother and me to basketball games. Cliff Keen, where I had volleyball camp each summer. The Michigan Theater, where I volunteered in high school. The Law Quad, where everyone took their senior pictures. The park where I played Rec & Ed soccer. The neighborhood where my preschool sat. It’ll be different when you’re in school, they said. And it was. But I’ve used up all my different. Now it’s all the same. The voices came back and they’re singing to me now.

I need to leave. Everything in my body is screaming at me to leave, leave Ann Arbor, my life isn’t here. My life is out there.

Staying here will destroy me. Staying here will limit me. It’s the expectation in the eyes of the family asking for my postgraduation plans, in the media, in the advice. I was supposed to leave before, but I have to do it now.

So why is it so hard?

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My aunt had a baby last year. I think he’s starting to recognize me. My grandma’s dog died last month. I miss him. My dog is getting old and my mom said she doesn’t plan on getting another one. I think my cat gets lonely. My grandparents are getting older. My uncle is probably going to move in with my parents at some point. My brother crashed his bike last week.

You should probably leave.

But what if I’m not here for the next thing?

Sometimes I watch my family and see myself in ten years.

There’s a trend (if you can call it that instead of a societal and cultural expectation) on social media these days of what it means to be an “eldest daughter.” She’s the one who bears the burden of caregiving, to siblings and parents. She protects her family and is expected to stay by them. She’s so burnt out by the time she reaches adulthood that she could never have kids of her own—she already raised her siblings. I’ve realized that the “eldest daughter” expectations can also expand into what it means to be the “only daughter.” I’ve seen it happen. My mom is one of two, the only girl and the youngest, but the caregiving of her parents falls onto her. The rest of the family isn’t entirely absent, but there is a difference between offering advice over text or a phone call and turning a den into a bedroom for two months twice a year. She’s the first to offer assistance. The one to visit her mother’s house on pretty much a weekly basis.

She’s the one who offers to drive family members to events and back home, and the one who takes in pets that can no longer be cared for. She makes time to visit and talk to people. My uncle is around and available, but it’s much more of a phone call, advice, type of availability. My mom’s availability is physical.

And it’s not just my mom who takes on this caregiving role; she’s one of many daughters that these responsibilities fall to.

Generally, daughters are significantly more likely to take on the caregiving responsibilities for aging parents. One study by a Princeton researcher found that daughters care for their aging parents about 12 hours a month, while sons provide less than half of that (Heitz 2019). It’s the sandwich generation effect; caregiving of aging parents falls to their children (who have children and lives of their own), and being a daughter multiplies it. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I don’t love it.

I do. I love that through my mom I am able to be around for family dinners, able to sit at the table with my grandparents as they talk about their lives and offer their opinions. I like being around to see my cousin grow, as he begins to speak and walk. But sometimes, I look at my brother and wonder how far he’s going to go without the thought of needing to be there for family, just in case. This division was never intentional on the part of my parents, but I do wonder if my brother thinks about family getting older the way that I do. If he thinks about how to stay connected and how to support everyone in the years to come. If it worries him.

Like me, my dad is the eldest of boys, and it’s to him that a lot of (if not all) of the caretaking falls. And again, I absolutely adore my family so it’s not too much of a burden on me to see these kinds of responsibilities in my future, and there’s only me and my brother so the “burden” isn’t too heavy. But sometimes I wonder about how these responsibilities that are waiting for me in the future are affecting my decisions now. The wind is singing for me to leave, but all of this is tugging on me to stay.

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Outside of the gendered sibling expectations, of course, there’s also just the general societal expectation that once a child comes of age, they must leave. What that expectation leaves out are the gendered, cultural, socioeconomic, and just general preference reasons people don’t always leave home, but the expectation is there all the same. You live with your parents until you graduate from high school, and then once you’re eighteen years old you’re gone. Now, some families take this more seriously than others, and a lot of people don’t have the ability to leave home for or after graduating college. But it’s so interesting to encounter the opinions of people when it comes to a child moving away from home. There’s an influencer I’ve followed for a while whose number one piece of advice is to leave your hometown. My dad, though he means well, does his best to push my brother and me to leave Ann Arbor and explore. I told one of my professors during office hours that I’ve lived in Ann Arbor my whole life, and she exclaimed, shocked, “Oh, yes of course, you need to get out of here. Live some life.” Two of my closest friends left Ann Arbor over the summer and proceeded to tell me upon their return how much better the dating pool was. And it’s not just in my life that these messages appear but in the media, as well. Think of all the car commercials, where parents stand in the driveway waving as the child drives away to college in a full-to-the-brim car.

Clearly, all signs point to going. And I want to. And yet.

The hardest thing to do is leave.

I’ve spent a lot of time through my college career wondering about what happens next. I love my family and have missed them so much from just not living at home even though I’m only ten minutes away. I worry about what I might miss if I go, and the looming expectations for myself and my parents in the coming years. I see my pets, baby cousin, and grandparents all getting older, and I want to be here to see them. But I also want to grow on my own.

So I’ve decided that I want to come back.

Ironically, what is making me the most ready to leave, is the permission I finally gave myself to come back. And so my leaving is also my staying.

Entering my senior year, I’ve finally realized that the fear of missing out on what “might” happen is not enough to delay what I need right now. And right now everything in me is being dragged away from Ann Arbor. I’m clutching on for dear life just to stay in this city for a few more months. I know, deep down though, that I’ll be back. Take from that what you will, but I feel it in my bones. I’ll be back around here eventually.

All this is just to say I like it here. I see myself in Ann Arbor, with my family. Laughing with them, eating with them, squeezing out every last drop of time with them that I can because this life isn’t forever. I don’t want to miss anything and wish I had been there. But still, there they are, all the ghosts of me following me down Huron Parkway, staring at me from the same trees I’ve driven past for most of my life: you should probably leave.

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