What The F Issue 25

STAFF

Bella Lowe Lindsey Smiles

Melissa Dash Claire Gallagher Michelle Wu Sam Auperlee Tess Beiter Morgan Butler Claire Bletsas Dimitra Colovos Claire Emch Ruhi Gulati Eli Merren Anna Nachazel Isabella Oh Huda Shulaiba Rachel Troy

Olivia Noff

Camden Treiber

Ava Berkwits Lucy Bernstein Maria D’Ambrosio Eleanor Durkee Sivan Ellman Snowy Iverson Eva Ji Lila MacKinnon Alaina McQuillan Stella Moore Maevis Rosengart

Lily Jankowiak

Elizabeth Wolfe Maddie Gaudet Colleen Hardman Molly Kraine Lydia Naser Megan White

Co-President Co-President

Editor-In-Chief Assistant Editor Assistant Editor Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer Staff Writer

Co-Art Director Co-Art Director Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Staff Artist Layout Co-Director Layout Co-Director Layout Staff Layout Staff Layout Staff Layout Staff Layout Staff

Julia Goldish Nia Saxon Izzy Basso Maddie Krawczyk Dylan Wade Aayana Anand Payton Aper Shelby Jenkins Makayla Kelly Grace Martin Lucia Perrone Suhani Suneja Grace Fisher Adrianna Kelly Emma Draheim Stella Fiorini Ella Hook Blythe McCurry Lena Schramm

Sana Hashmi Logan Brown Fiona Henne Sofia Tosi

Faith Johnson Verena Wu Quinn Engel Meg Harmon Ella Larsen

Co-Social Media Director Co-Social Media Staff Social Media Staff Social Media Staff Social Media Staff Co-Podblog Director Co-Podblog Director Podblog Staff Podblog Staff Podblog Staff Podblog Staff Podblog Staff

Co-Events Director Co-Events Staff Events Staff Events Staff Events Staff Events Staff Events Staff

Co-Marketing Director Co-Marketing Director Marketing Staff Marketing Staff Co-Education Director Co-Education Director Education Staff Education Staff 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.

W-t-f?!

Letter from the Editor

8w7: The Nonconformist Reading Gottfried Ben and Living Beast Days On Lacking Maternal Desire (There is no loose change but there are) Teeth in my Pocket The Love Doctor Needs Her License Revoked

The Higher You Climb The Harder You Fall Looking Back Down the Socioeconomic Ladder Bisexuality is in the Eye of the Beholder

Fall Retrospective Playlist Looking at Relationships from the Outside: A Single Perspective Just When I Needed Myself Most I Can’t Be a Villain The Unattainability of Being the Main Character “Como agua para chocolate” Writing Myself as the Main Character Treat Us Kindly Aisle 10 Wanting The Main Character of Me Credits

Welcome to What The F, your feminist periodical!

Dear Reader,

I invite you to press pause on life for a moment. Take a deep breath or two and find your place of comfort. Whether it be in the privacy of your dorm room, at a window table in the Ugli, or on a picnic blanket in the middle of the law quad (of course, only if the weather permits), travel to your safe space and immerse yourself in the following pages. In short, unwind and romanticize your life a little—or let the writers do so for you. Silence your cell phone, brew your tea, and put on your rose-colored glasses. Sink into Issue 25 and join us in discovering how identity, experiences, and social context influence the way we see ourselves and others. Follow along through eighteen stories of main character moments, battles with perfectionism, and how our staff has navigated relationships, sexuality, and personhood.

The idea behind rose-colored glasses emerged from a combination of pitches from the writers. More than once, themes such as romanticization, expectations, and reflection were tossed around the meeting room, and it only felt right to speak to the issues plaguing both the writers and readers. The mission statement of our organization begins, “At What the F, we believe that telling stories builds community. It enables us to find common ground.” Relatability for all people has always been a goal of ours, and I hope you find some of yourself within our writers’ words. In the creation of these pages, the team was tasked with reimagining aspects of their lives by donning or removing a “pink lens.” What I’ve learned through their narratives—and I trust you will as well—is that a small change in perspective can be a secret weapon on the path to self-discovery and lasting happiness. There are endless vantage points to travel toward, countless mindsets to experiment with.

I hope this short prelude has inspired you to cozy up with a soft blanket, light your favorite candle, and get lost in rose-tinted tales. Allow yourself to adopt a lens far from your own and ask yourself, “through which color do I see the world?” We are so happy you’re here.

All my love,

Melissa

Dash Editor-In-Chief

8w7: The Nonconformist

by Huda Shulaiba

the free Truity enneagram personality test brands me blunt (I know), assertive (I know.), challenger (I KNOW.). somewhere, my first-grade teacher hears this and laughs. her brown skin and quiet demeanor matched mine at the time.

if who I am is who I’ve become, I must not be mine.

scratch that. if who we are is who we’ve become, I must be spitting mad. incensed at the freedom given to Toby, Molly, Sue, whoever.

any speech I deliver is just this: a set of responses, nothing more “restriction begets ingenuity”

whether it be due to surveillance or its absence, it must be because I made it so. re-hijacked by me (mine)!

if you feel you must let me know I belong (un-cut my cords, so to speak), you must have thought I doubted that in the first place

What a curious thing it is to shape and be shaped!

Reading Gottfried Benn and Living Beast Days

by Huda Shulaiba

if I am a horror, it is because I am and it is what I will be. I am a horror! because if your thumbs graze me, they burn red. and bleed. you say I am made of teeth and so I must be!

if horrors have wisdom, then I am full of it. if they do not, that has nothing to do with me as I am a horror and choose to be full of it regardless. see how teeth can be filed and mine are proof! I can grin, see, never condemned to graze by my own hand.

if I am something, it is because I must be and also because they say I must not. a glimpse of defiance: onlookers switch off. once, the horror was theirs. soon, the horror will be mine. red does not suit my horror and green will do nicely. I am a horror. I will be green and when her thumbs graze me, they will sting just slightly. I am making the horror mine.

On Lacking Maternal Desire

by Claire Gallagher

In 2015, Pope Francis told St. Peter’s Square that “the choice not to have children is selfish,” declaring that choosing to be childless “takes some of our humanity away.”

The leader of the Catholic Church is far from alone in his sentiments. A study on the perceptions of married individuals who choose not to have children concluded that moral outrage is a driving force behind the stigma of childless people as unfulfilled and unhappy, providing empirical evidence that parenthood for married individuals is perceived to be a moral imperative. The study contextualizes itself with previous literature which found evidence that, when compared to people who chose to become parents, those who did not choose parenthood are perceived as “less fulfilled and more poorly adjusted psychologically.” The literature also noted that voluntarily childless women were “evaluated less favorably than mothers by both women and men.” Labeling parenthood as a socially prescribed role for married individuals, this study concluded that deviation from this imperative is met with moral outrage. The study was conducted on a group of psychology students at a large Midwestern U.S. university, finding that target individuals who chose childlessness

evoked “anger, disgust, and disapproval,” leading to the perception that these individuals were psychologically unfulfilled or maladjusted.

I’ve never fantasized about having children or being a mother, never experienced baby fever, never listed potential names to myself or wondered if I would put them in soccer or basketball or gymnastics or swimming. I have, however, listened to my sister and my friends express their anticipation and excitement over the prospect of motherhood. I’ve listened to my mother, grandmother, and greatgrandmother detail that pull in their gut that refused to loosen without a child. It’s tangible, their desire. I can see it. I can pull it apart and knead it between my fingers and inhale its smell and touch my tongue to its surface. I’m so close to it, it’s making my eyes water. So when I imagine what my future will look like, I fill in the stock image of marriage and motherhood.

Beginning in early childhood, there’s a path reinforced to women that their happy ending should center around marriage and motherhood, whether that be through pregnancy, adoption, or surrogacy. Girls are conditioned to believe that maternal behavior is equivalent to being good. Good girls are helpful or good girls are caring or good girls are role models. In kindergarten,

my aunt gave me a babydoll, complete with different onesies to dress her in and a milk bottle to feed her with. I played house with my friends, taking turns at assignments of mother and child, wrapping aprons around each other's bellies to make dinner from playdough. In every year of grade school, my teachers assigned me to sit next to boys who were too rowdy or disruptive in class. They instructed me to guide them, focus them, help them, mature them, so when my table partner in fifth grade got into a fight during recess, our teacher reprimanded me too.

I suppose I never knew a different path. I read books and watched movies and shows in which the conclusion of the female protagonist’s journey was always motherhood. My first job was babysitting, while my ex-boyfriend’s first job was lawn mowing. I listened to the absentminded wording of other people who always gave me advice in the form of when you have children and never if you have children. The future is so frightening when you’re young—so many things are unknown that you can’t help but want to fill in gaps where you can.

I am afraid of this future that I have filled in for so long. I dread it, in fact. I am told that I will change my mind, I’m too young to know what

I want, everything will change when I meet the right person, I don’t know what I’m missing out on, I won’t feel this way once my biological clock starts ticking! I will change my mind, I will change my mind, I will change my mind. I can pinpoint tangible reasons for this fear: the nightmare of labor, the hormonal disruptions, passing down the faults of my parents, etc., but really, it’s the absence of desire that scares me.

There’s an anecdote I often hear which tells some variation of the same story— about a woman who never wanted children. She either likes her career too much to have time for a baby or she’s afraid of losing her body or she’s afraid of the responsibility or she has parents whom she’s afraid of turning into. One day, she is gripped with sudden desire— overwhelming, all-consuming yearning for a child. She must have one. She will never be complete without one. So she becomes a mother and she is terrific at it.

I am afraid of

being a mother, yes. But I am afraid of the other future too— of not being a mother. I am afraid that I won’t change my mind, that my lack of desire for motherhood will always be there. I am afraid that never feeling this calling makes me less of a woman. I am afraid that not being a mother means I will never feel satisfied or fulfilled. That it will mean I have forsaken some duty. Any person, regardless of gender or sex, who grows up and chooses not to have children is thought of in a certain way— strange, cold, or abnormal—but a woman who does not wish for a child is a freak of nature—a failed recipe missing the maternal desire that’s meant to be inherent in a woman.

When I look for comfort or some justification for the way I feel, I can’t help but think about the tabloidgenerated image of “Sad Jen” Aniston: childless and miserable, abandoned by Brad for Angelina. Jen: 0 (children), Angelina: 6 (children). I think about Notting Hill and its closing shot of Anna with a hand around her swollen belly and her head in Will’s lap

while he reads. I think about Leslie in Parks and Recreation reducing her entire character development over seven seasons to this statement about having triplets: “I realized something. Everything that we have been through…all of it has just been preparation for this.” I think about how all three female leads in Friends are mothers by the end of the show. I think about US Weekly’s “Bump Watch,” dedicated entirely to monitoring and photographing the possibilities of pregnancy in female celebrities. I try to think of women in the media who have not at one point or another had their entire being centered around having or not having a child and I struggle.

The media’s fixation on motherhood as a social role for women is a reflection of a society that fails women who don’t want to have children. Women who seek medical sterilization, whether it be for medical reasons or personal choice, are turned away by doctors who tell them they don’t know what they’re doing, they haven’t thought the decision through, or of course, they’ll change their mind. A gynecologist in Cedar-Sinai’s Family Planning Program calls this sort of dissuasion “pure paternalism…the notion of female sterilization and regret are inappropriately paired.” Some doctors require partner approval of the sterilization, while some

impose mandatory waiting periods or psychological evaluations—reminiscent of barriers imposed to complicate the process of an abortion. In the case of a couple in Virginia, Andrell and Aaron Laniewicz, the pair did not want children. Even if they had wished for children, Andrell had a medical condition that would have made pregnancy dangerous for her health. She sought tubal ligation and was denied by four separate doctors. When her husband then called a doctor inquiring about a vasectomy, he was scheduled for a procedure the next day. This disparity further illustrates the paternalistic attitude that medical professionals take towards women.

While one could argue that vasectomies are more easily reversed than tubal ligations, the extreme ease with which Aaron was able to obtain his procedure, in contrast to the barriers that his wife faced, points to an issue beyond the differences in reversibility. There is a clear parallel between denying women access to sterilization and denying women access to abortion. In both scenarios, women are not trusted to make choices about their own bodies, so they’re refused the option.

This parallel reveals the pronatalist sentiments that are embedded in our culture. Further, the moral outrage and negative perceptions of voluntarily childless women point to

a puritanical obsession with condemning female sexual agency; if a sexually active woman isn’t trying to have children, then that means she is having sex for a reason other than to reproduce, and god forbid a woman have sex for her own pleasure. While I question societal logic, I might as well question my own logic too. I have allowed stigma and stereotypes to make me question what I want. I have allowed social roles to let me, as silly as this sounds, lose sight of my value beyond my uterus. I’m working on it.

When my old ballet teacher had a baby, I was his first nanny. I took care of him everyday for the past two summers, when he was six months and then again when he was a year and a half. I love him a lot. So when I would hold him, I would sometimes wonder what it would feel like to be loved by something as wholly and completely as he loved his mother. I would wonder about the way that I love my own mother, and about how it would feel to be that person for somebody else. There is so much unique beauty in motherhood. I admire it greatly and still do not wish for it. I could love and appreciate my bond with him and love and appreciate his bond with his mother while not wishing for a baby of my own in the future. For now, this thought is enough for me.

(There is no loose change but there are) Teeth in my Pocket

by Sam Aupperlee

Do you have that memory? that morning we, all of us instincted our hands under our pillows and found nothing.

deficit we, all of us felt in our pockets that night when we handed our laundry to moms who we now knew wore wings.

How were we to weigh ourselves down, to fill our pockets, to heavy? we only grew up because mothers are liars.

my young friends, we became, we grew up to be the perfect little lost lit-screen army; landline cords growing from our hips.

Do you know that these tangles between us lie too? we know each other so well we don’t need to see one another.

can you remember the face of anyone you don’t know? can it ring from your pocket? we forget or we reschedule There’s a box called everything living in our pockets and our parents never told us how to close it. to wonder. do you know how to do it? to carry every answer? how to now leave no question unanswered? no one asked us.

There are glistening burning worlds in our pockets, on fire

and standing in front of us. two small mirrors; we see one.

There’s a time called extinction. young friends, we were born in it. our fathers and mothers weren’t. we won’t take dirty money.

Here is a conversation between the tooth fairy and you, who saw Mom’s coin purse thin. you: I don’t think you exist now.

The Love Doctor Needs Her License Revoked

By Anonymous

“I can’t believe the two of them are still together. Really. It’s been, what, five years? Five whole years and I don’t think he’s made her come once.”

“Mmhmm.”

My boyfriend types on his phone with one hand, sliding his other into the arid landscape in my pants.

“Honey.”

He doesn’t look up from his phone. Drama in the pledge class Groupme.

“Honey, what did I just say? Are you listening?”

“Huh?”

He ever so slightly licks his chapped, neglected lips “Nevermind.”

I look up at the concrete ceiling as his calloused finger pokes around sloppily and I try not to think about his stubble chafing my skin or his high, bloodshot eyes gazing into the computer screen on the bed in front of us rather than into mine. I feel his breath quicken, his body beginning to expect something of me. I try—and fail—to make my body respond. A metronome goes off in my head: 6/8 time signature. On every third count, a fake moan or a fake sigh. One, two, moan, three, four, sigh. Why should sex matter in a relationship, anyway, when it’s the feelings that count? It’s midnight. I hear pounding from the hallway, someone slurring my roommate’s name. I look through the peephole to find her boyfriend, keeled over. Reluctantly, I open the door and am hit by the stench of cigarettes and Natty Light. His hands and knees fall to the floor, and he begins to retch. “GIGI!” I yell. “He’s barfing on our floor again, get the FUCK in here!”

The door across the hallway barely has to open for her to fit through. Gigi tiptoes over to her convulsing boyfriend and gingerly puts a hand on his shoulder.

He wipes the remaining vomit from his chin with the back of his hand.

“Hey Baby.”

No response from her.

He rises from the floor, swaying, one hand stabilized by the wall, another grasped around her neck, pushing her towards her bed. I shoot her a look with the subtext, “do you want

me to do something about this?” She shakes her head and herds him back into the room. The door slams behind them. The vomit remains uncleaned, and I can see my reflection in the yellow-green puddle, darted with flecks of fluorescent light. I have to tell someone about this, and my other roommate, Liv, is away.

The phone rings a few times before my own boyfriend picks up. “Babe, Gigi’s boyfriend barfed in our living room, AGAIN.”

“Mmhmm”

“I don’t know why she puts up with him, I don’t even think he makes her happy. He isn’t attractive, he cheats on her… and if she thinks I am helping clean up that barf puddle she is sorely mistaken.”

“Hey, um… can you open the door?”

My boyfriend’s skinny forearms are covered in bruises and scratches. He’s pinching his nostrils in an effort to stem the flow of blood that’s painting his lips and chin red. His right eyelid is swollen and purple.

“You told me that you weren’t going to the brotherhood event. You told me that it was optional.”

Silently, he looks at the floor. Defeated, I help him over to the couch, laying him down.

“The light.” His voice is hoarse, slurred. “It’s hurting my head.”

I grab a tissue and dab at his bloody nose before placing a bag of frozen chicken nuggets, acting doubly as an aid to stop the swelling in his eye and as a blindfold to block the light, across his forehead. I remember that earlier, he had promised that he would cook me dinner tonight.

“Could you please, for the love of god, put on pants and a shirt when you’re in my kitchen?!”

I am recently single and I don’t want to play hostess to Liv’s out-of-town boyfriend, who is attempting to air fry a steak while half naked.

“Maybe you should try taking off your shirt so we can match.”

“Liv,” I whine. “Where are you?” She waltzes out of her room and over to her boyfriend, wet hair bundled in a towel on top of her head. His hand immediately finds her ass.

“Awwwwwwwww, you cooked me dinner?”

“Yeah,” he says, “but I could use a little help. Go look for some butter in the fridge.”

A very long year and a few men later, I’ve finally figured out why my body wouldn’t respond to my ex-boyfriend’s touch. “Women,” I explain to Liv as I apply mascara for the date I have later that evening, “are different from men. The power dynamics in heterosexual relationships are just…off. For men, sexual attraction is inherently linked to violence.”

“It looks like sexual attraction is inherently linked to violence for women, too,” Liv says, eyebrows raised, pointing at the scratches that line my back, badly hidden by a sheet of long hair.

“That’s different,” I retort.

The date is at a concert for a local band, where this new girl will meet my friend group. Sweaty bodies congregate in a parking lot, the air is hazy with smoke, chatter mixes with terrible amateur rock music. When I see her, I pull her in for a kiss, which she resists.

“I don’t want to ruin my lipgloss.”

Each of my friends enthusiastically introduces themselves, but she doesn’t respond.

“Sorry,” she says, “I told a friend I would meet them here. Give me one second,” she promises, the curves of her body disappearing into the crowd.

I don’t normally smoke, but I reach for the blunt in my friend’s hand.

“Are you sure? It’s pretty strong.”

The blunt makes its way to my mouth. I take four hits.

Five terrible, amateur rock songs later, she still hasn’t come back.

Liv taps my shoulder. “Hey, I think it’s time for us to go home.”

“But we have to wait for her song!”

“It’s not worth it. I hate to say it, but she ditched you, and you deserve better.”

I don’t respond, instead choosing to pick at the grass growing out of a crack in the pavement in front of my feet.

A wave of weed-induced nausea washes over me and I stumble inside to the bathroom, hoping to find a toilet, a trashcan, anything. It’s locked.

“Guyssssssssssss,” I jostle the doorknob, “whoever is in thereeeeeeee, can you hurry the fuck up please?! I’m gonna yack!”

No response.

I slide down the wall behind me and wait in case whoever is in there will be done soon. After twenty minutes of swallowing my vomit with my head in my hands, the door creaks open.

I look up slightly. Two figures materialize between the gaps in my fingers. My vision comes into focus on my date, her hair messy, shirt on backwards, neck covered in purple splotches, and a tall, androgynous person who is clearly not me, back and chest covered in scratches identical to the ones that line my skin from last night.

This, unfortunately, was not my last date with her.

With winter comes cuffing season and with a new year comes a new girl. I can’t help but feel smug that I’ve found someone so obsessed with me when the majority of my friends beg for affection and attention from men who refuse to give it to them—men who are constantly preoccupied with the shiny newness of girls at bars, at parties, and the constant novelty that dating apps have to offer. Straight men, I think, always have a “roster.”

The first month with her is giddy, full of breathless makeouts and laughter and sleepovers. Then, things start to sour. To her, I am no better than a vibrator, an on-demand orgasm. I am sturdy silicone without flesh or blood, able to handle violent manipulation by sharp acrylic nails. I am to remain in her bedside drawer and not to be acknowledged in public, where she is still closeted. I am to be used when she is drunk or bored or needs help falling asleep. Vibrators, unlike people, are unable to say no. Vibrators, unlike people, don’t require consent. She is disappointed by my short battery life, hoping that pleading and coercion will help me recharge.

I’m pulled out of an exhausted, post-coital daze by the blue light emanating from her screen. She thinks I am asleep. Silently, I look over her shoulder, but my cover is broken when I gasp at what I see: a Tinder roster. Little blue dots each representing a man or woman who isn’t me, a future or current victim. Backups for when I run out of battery. I remember her telling me how different I was, how she wasn’t looking for or talking to anyone else, how she wanted to spend Valentine’s Day together. Everything that I’d shamed my straight friends for believing when the men in their life had said it to them.

“He doesn’t mean it,” I’d preach.“He just wants to keep you on the roster, in his orbit.”

She clicks on a blue dot and types out, word for word, the phrase that first got me into bed with her, pink acrylic nails making tapping noises on the screen.

“Are you serious?” I ask, voice shaky. “Hitting on other people when you’re in my apartment? In my room? In my bed?”

She turns around, stunned, mouth wide open. In that moment, the illusion wears off. The two way mirror I’d been viewing my life through shatters, replaced with a window.

“Get. Out. NOW.”

TheHigher Yo u Climb The Hard er Y o u Fall

by Tess Beiter

I’ve never quite managed to perfect the art of falling.

Kids fall a lot, so I’m sure that I was better at it then. We all were, weren’t we? We’d take ferocious tumbles onto the soft grass of the playground. We’d trip on our shoelaces while running in neighborhood capture-theflag games. We’d trustingly leap into the shallow end of the pool or throw ourselves onto the trampoline while golden afternoon shadows elongated and the air was thick with warmth.

Falling was easy, then. There was that initial point of fear when your balance tipped, your arms windmilled, and your body gave in to the unyielding force of gravity. But then a dizzying kaleidoscope of colors spun around you, an entirely unique array of color and sound that lasted only a moment before you hit the ground. But something was always there to catch you—or someone would be there to pick you up and brush away your tears, if it came to that.

I don’t remember when it shifted for me. I don’t remember when falling became something to fear rather than a simple consequence of everyday life. All I remember is standing in fifth grade music class and realizing that I was absolutely incapable of trust falls. It was funny for a moment. But as I looked into the eyes of my middle school best friend, a darker part of me wondered why I couldn’t allow myself to trust that she’d catch me if I fell.

As I continued on, falling became something I actively worked to avoid. For perfectionists, even small blunders are abhorrent, and the path I was on was a slippery slope to that particular personality trait. I was a joy to have in class, out-spoken and involved, but the stress of keeping that up was not easy for a young mind. And yet I allowed myself no other option. It’s interesting, looking back, as this pressure was almost entirely self-inflicted. My parents never bullied me toward greatness, only told me to try my best, and I faced no strenuous pressure from other authority figures. So what exactly caused me to be so petrified of messing up? Why was it absolutely necessary that I succeed at all costs?

Allow me to paint you a picture. I’m in eighth grade religion class, seventh period. I’d just finished my thirdquarter test and passed it to the person next to me to

check. I received my score back as a 33/35. The boy sitting on my right smirked at his score, a 33.5, and gloated that he “couldn’t believe he’d beaten me.” I took a deep breath, smoothed my plaid uniform skirt, and laughed through my teeth. He won’t next time, I swore to myself. And he didn’t.

Falling was becoming unthinkable. Slipping up was something I wouldn’t allow myself to do, in any capacity. I’d always been competitive and driven, always pushed myself to the limit in order to do my best. I was always racing to catch up with my older siblings and to prove myself as an equal among my peers, most of whom were a year older. Don’t get me wrong—it had its positive effects. My grades were amazing, my chores were usually done promptly, and I had some pretty ambitious plans for my future. I also can’t deny how good it felt when the other students would pump their fists after seeing my name listed with theirs for a group project. The well-earned pride I felt when seeing my hard work pay off was, at one point, a reward on its own. The uniform line of A’s marching down my report card sated me; the satisfaction of completing tasks in accordance with my own standards felt incredible. But as time progressed, the more insidious aspects of this perfectionism were revealed.

Answer me this: when one falls into the habit of strict perfectionism, when one is so incredibly focused on outside achievements and appearances that there’s hardly time to think otherwise, what becomes of the inside of them?

Humans aren’t perfect, but a perfectionist doesn’t understand that. There’s always another goal to achieve, another standard they aren’t meeting, another person they haven’t impressed. There is always something more. I reached the point where my current achievements meant almost nothing. I’d study and study for a test, then allow myself a single fleeting moment of happiness and accomplishment at my grade before asking, “What’s next?” The traits that had once positively shaped who I was had somehow corrupted, forcing me into an endless cycle of impossible standards and self-contempt. I would work myself to the bone, whittling my soul down, only to shift to the next task immediately afterward. It was a grueling, painful process. Mistakes were made, obviously, but I would berate myself for them and actively work to avoid committing a similar one again. In my mind, these flaws and mistakes formed an endless checklist to

accomplish. I was convinced, however, that there was an end—a haven of comfort and peace far in the future— and I would never truly be happy until I reached it. It was almost a sort of addiction, endlessly chasing the feelings of satisfaction I’d once allowed myself to enjoy at my accomplishments. But now self-appreciation was lost, as much of a dream as the free-falls I’d taken as a child.

At this point, my life had completely lost its saturation. I was living in such a state of exhaustion and discontent with who I was that the world around me morphed into a colorless hellscape of gray backed by an unsettling soundtrack of dull, white noise. My actions were monotonous, focused entirely on the next task, the next box to check off. It had happened gradually, an imperceptible and slippery slope to self-destruction. One of the worst parts of it is that, on some superficial level, I was aware of this decline—and I tried so hard to convince myself that I liked this way of viewing the world that it’s almost comical. But the truth is that for years, without fully realizing the depth of it, I’d been falling upwards as if careening through the layers of the atmosphere. The colors of the world slowly dimmed, the air around me quietly thinned, and I would startle awake to find myself gasping for air and shaking with anxiety in the stall of my school bathroom. I felt completely untethered. I had been so afraid of messing up for so long that I’d completely lost touch with who I was, and that was one of the gravest failings I could have possibly committed.

I had been so afraid of falling that I’d never realized that we are human, and falling is a necessity.

We are going to make mistakes. We are going to slip up, stray off our paths, and fall. It will be painful and messy, but we have to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. Does it truly matter how many times you fall if you still make it to the finish line?

It wasn’t an easy change. Rather, it hit me like a slap to the face. How had it happened that my desperate, feverish attempts to prevent failure ended up becoming the failure itself? There is a sick sort of irony in that my striving to perfect myself outwardly meant that I was truly failing the young girl lost inside of me. I had climbed too far, reached too close to the sun, and crashed back down to earth with a shocking

breathlessness. It was an abrupt wake-up call, but an entire mindset shift doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been a learning curve, and it’s one that is still ongoing. One aspect that’s been pivotal in attaining this shifted worldview is realizing the importance of romanticizing the small moments of ordinary, everyday beauty.

It started slowly. I would linger over my coffee a moment longer, savoring its earthy taste. I would tilt my head up to feel the sun’s warmth on my cheeks for a few seconds when I stepped outside. I’d stop my younger sister in the school hallway to tell her about a funny occurrence in English class. I would look just a little longer at the way the flowers on my kitchen table were arranged, marveling at their colors. If you look for it, beauty is all around you, and stopping to appreciate it has helped tether me to the world and the wonders it holds.

This romanticism of daily life has truly changed the way I look at the world. I’ll never be able to fully view the world with rose-colored glasses—my practicality and logic are central to who I am, and I will forever be a perfectionist. The important part is that I learn to balance these aspects. Both perfectionism and romanticism are harmful in their own ways, but they also both hold incredible benefits. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve managed to find an equilibrium that works for me. It is sometimes easy to forget myself and look down on romanticism; cold, hard logic may be brutal, but it is effective. The undeniable beauty and power of these tiny moments, however, takes me by surprise every time. I now experience these ethereal moments numerous times a day, and I mourn the fact that my younger self missed out on so much. She had no clue what the rest of the world held. She was truly trapped, fighting her way through a colorless layer of the world. These moments help bring me down to earth, back to myself, reminding me that life needs to be lived in the moment. Mistakes need to be made to make life worth living.

I’m still not fully comfortable with that type of falling, but I think I’m okay with that. It’s an art, and art cannot be perfected. We are human because we fall, and we fall because we are human.

It is scary, yes, but that’s life. There’s good reason to be scared of the unknown. Anything could be out there, after all. But isn’t that part of the appeal?

And doesn’t that make falling all the more worth it?

Looking Back Down the Socioeconomic Ladder

by Michelle Wu

My family used to be dependent on food stamps, or more specifically on WIC. The Women, Infants, and Children Program is a public health and nutrition program organized under the United States Department of Agriculture and funded by individual states. According to the Minnesota WIC brochure, WIC is for “infants, children up to age 5, and women [who are] pregnant, breastfeeding, or recently had a baby” who meet the income requirements. We qualified for WIC under all the conditions: I was younger than 5 years old, my mom was pregnant with my younger brother, and as a Ph.D. candidate, my dad’s stipend was significantly below the income requirements.

While most of my WIC memories take place before the age of 5, they are still some of the most lucid memories from my childhood. I vividly recall how I used to carry my favorite stuffed animal (a duck!) with me everywhere—even to the grocery store. My mom would clutch my right hand as I squeezed the duck inside my left arm. Our grocery runs were always the same. It was so systematic and unchanging that even as a toddler, I knew which brand of milk we were going to buy, which bread was the staple in our home (only whole wheat was allowed, never organic though), and what juice flavors I was allowed to have (apple, grape, or tomato). Grocery stores always felt so small to me. Even with the wide array of options, we were limited to whatever was on the printed copy of the WIC shopping guide my mom carried in her purse. On the guide, under the bold red text that read “DO NOT BUY”, flavored milk was listed—thus chocolate milk became a luxury I would only discover once elementary school began.

Since we qualified for WIC, I also qualified for the free meal program once I started grade school. I always arrived at school early to maximize the program benefits by getting breakfast at the cafeteria—I had never enjoyed so many treats before. My go-to breakfast consisted of a Smucker’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a carton of chocolate milk, neither of which we were ever allowed to have at home because of the WIC grocery guidelines. I remember asking my mom why we couldn’t stock up on the same sugary snacks at home and she responded that they weren’t on the shopping list. I don’t think I thought too much

about it, all I knew was that the WIC shopping guide determined all our food for us and that school served tastier breakfast than home. It wasn’t long before the lunch lady became my best friend and the wooden craft stick with my meal pin number written on it turned into my most treasured possession. That stick is still in my childhood memory box. 31111.

It’s a strange feeling to recall my family’s humble beginnings, although I can now acknowledge that they have shaped

me into the person I am today. This disconnect exists because of the way we mobilized. While the circumstances of my life have changed, my mindset is still rooted in the past. It has now been over a decade since we moved from Minnesota to Ridgewood, New Jersey—a wealthy commuter town of New York City. My dad completed his graduate studies and now works in investment banking in NYC. My family doesn’t face the financial stress that we used to nor do we rely on any form of

financial aid. It is a far cry from the WIC days. We live comfortably and have a house we can call our own. I have my own room as opposed to sharing it with my younger brother and my aunt, who used to live with us at the time. My younger brothers and I can learn and pursue whatever we want. I remember wanting to learn ballet so desperately as a child, but my parents simply could not afford to pay for lessons, even the discounted ones held at the community center. While that dream died out a long time ago, I have had the opportunity to learn to swim, fence, golf, play tennis, and also play three different instruments since the WIC days. We have the ability to eat whatever we want. Before, it was the height of fine dining for my family to go to the Old Country Buffet once every two or three months, but now we can dine at Michelin-star restaurants in NYC. It is the classic immigrant success story of the American Dream. While my WIC days are seemingly behind me, the impact those 5 years had on my life has been substantial. I didn’t realize the extent to which WIC affected my daily routine and personal habits until I compared my behaviors and viewpoint to my younger brothers. My brother Mason only participated in the WIC program for the first year and a half of his life, and it exists only as an intangible memory for him. Similarly, my youngest brother Max was fortunate to never experience our days of financial stress, as he was born once my family had already achieved upward mobility. In fact, I am certain that he probably believes we have always been affluent. I have seen how these differences in our childhoods have manifested into reality and affected our spending habits.

For example, Mason’s fashion choices are certainly flashy and expensive. He splurges on designer shoes and apparel without batting an eye at the prices. When called out, he justifies the price by explaining the design choice, material, and even the exclusivity of the product. Sometimes it absolutely blows my mind that he thinks he is making an investment by paying $700 for a single pair of shoes. They’re shoes! They’ll get worn out or—god forbid—go out of style! I don’t understand.

Max is younger and has a less developed sense of money due to his age, but he still has never had to worry about how much a Panera sandwich or a steak dinner can cost. Whenever he travels to downtown Ridgewood with his friends, he doesn’t think twice before swiping his debit card on a $6.00 bubble tea. He asks if he can order takeout at least once a week. He always goes for soda and other fizzy, sugary, non-WIC drinks—a far cry from the shopping guide that used to sit in my mother’s purse.

Even within one family unit, my behaviors regarding spending are vastly different from my brothers. From my mom, I have inherited the extreme couponing and cross-checking of prices before pulling the trigger and clicking the purchase button. While it’s common for people to search for discounts and low prices, I doubt that many make it as laborious of a task as I do. The 10 separate email accounts, all a slight variation of my main account (think michellewu001 vs. michellewu002), are needed for coupon codes, discounts, and other deals. Then, of course, I scour the corners of the internet for the faint possibility of a better discount code (there usually is one if you try hard enough). The most time-consuming part is the price comparison rummaging through different sites to cross-check discounted prices. It is a whole process. The difference in my monetary perspective compared to my siblings or the general public becomes most evident when I have an emotional response to shopping. I have a strange aversion to thrifting (and so does my mother—she asks, “why not just buy something unused if I am going to buy something?”). The concept of thrifting is wonderful, it reduces waste created by mass production and fast fashion, but it also serves as a reminder of the

way everything I owned during my WIC days was a secondhand item. From my wardrobe to my toys, it was rare to come across something that was completely new unless the price had been marked down a ridiculous amount. In particular, the way thrifting has become “trendy” and a way for cool, rich girls to profit drives me insane. I feel flames of somewhat misplaced anger and irritability when I see micro-influencers posting TikTok hauls of thrifted goods they found for all their wonderful followers (read: thrifted goods as upcharge by insane amounts on Depop).

Yet, that anger still doesn’t beat the guilt I feel whenever I buy a pricey item—usually a designer item or luxury good—or the embarrassment of inviting friends over to my house. All throughout middle and high school, whenever my friends hung out at someone’s house, it was never mine. I’m so sorry, but my parents don’t like when I have people over or my brothers are super busy and have their piano lessons at that time. These were some of my favorite excuses to use and I always ensured they were on the back burner. In reality, I was just uncomfortable. Although all my friends lived in Ridgewood like I did or were from other affluent neighborhoods nearby, I knew we were different for many reasons. There was always that underlying fear that they would be able to see through my house and my life as a facade. I wasn’t born into this wealth like they were. The first five years of a child’s life set the trajectory for their adulthood. The scientific reason for this has something to do with the most neural connections being made and the brain developing the fastest during this time—honestly, I’m not too sure about the specifics—but I hold this statement to be true from personal experience. It’s been difficult to grow out of the mindset developed while dependent on the WIC program. There is the anger, the guilt, the insecurity, the frugality—but there is also the resourcefulness and the ability to relate to those who are struggling financially on a personal level. I am so immensely grateful to have this additional perspective from growing up with a reliance on WIC. And while I can’t say that I would ever want to go back to my WIC days, they have become a core part of my identity, especially in the way I am able to appreciate the little things (like the way I cherish chocolate milk, something that my brothers will never understand or see as important). This appreciation grows ever stronger with the “big things,” as I am that much more appreciative of my parents’ hardships and dedication in trying their best to “make it” in a new country for me and for my siblings. Many of us come from humble beginnings, but I have truly learned how important that is in appreciating all the good that can come later.

Bisexuality is in the eye of the beholder

by Dimitra Colovos

Have you hooked up with any girls since we broke up? My ex bluntly asked me this during what I considered to be a casual, post-breakup conversation. We had been in a heterosexual relationship, but remained friendly enough that I felt comfortable mentioning how I was finally at ease with my bisexuality since our breakup—there were some positives I could extract from the heartbreak. And then he asked me that question. Have you hooked up with any girls since we broke up? Of course he didn’t ask me if I had hooked up with any guys, or if I was interested in another guy or if I was dating another guy or literally anything about another guy—that would have been too inappropriate in his mind. Why when it came to girls did he feel so curious about picking me apart, why didn’t the answer matter when it came to guys? Does he just see me as some enigma to pick apart, justified in asking questions because bisexuality is so mysterious and hard to understand? All I wanted was to feel as if the questions about girls mattered as much as the questions about guys, that liking girls wasn’t out of the ordinary and should be treated with the same delicacy as asking me about guys—he was not owed an answer just because I am not straight. In just 11 words he invalidated the sexuality I had finally accepted.

The irony of his question was that I hadn’t hooked up with a girl at that point. And suddenly, just like that, I felt as if my entire sexuality was a lie. If someone could boil this fragile concept down to one simple question, then it must just be that simple. Have you hooked up with any girls? In that moment, I was forced to confront what I then thought must be the truth—I haven’t hooked up with a girl, and therefore I’m not bisexual, I only want to be with men, and people that live outside of my head know my life much better than I do. That was the honest truth that a (now turned) stranger had just decided for me, right?

Wrong—a conclusion I am only able to gather ten months later. I now sit and wonder why he was allowed to ask that, and more importantly, why I let him? I even went so far as to answer him honestly, defending myself as to why I hadn’t managed to hookup with a girl since our breakup four months prior.

would be a lot of catching up to do. This almost became a sort of challenge that I feverishly accepted to prove my bisexuality to both myself and others. I vowed that if anyone was to ever ask about my sexuality again, that I would be able to answer it in the way they understood it: I have hooked up with and am dating men and women equally. After all, the narrative surrounding bisexual people is that we are a scientific anamoly and sexual mystery, so I made it my mission to make sure I fit into the “bisexual mold” (threesome, anyone?).

Months later and many stages of growth further, I’ve started to let go of this challenge. This process, however, has been slow and difficult at times, as the need to validate my sexuality lingers. Sometimes my friends and I talk about the classic stereotypes surrounding bisexuality, like being the perfect third person for a threesome as aforementioned. But sometimes it doesn’t even feel worth the breath to discuss, as it’s already overplayed and we are tired. Recently, I’ve had conversations with bisexual friends about how difficult it is to explain to your (accepting, even) parents that bisexuality is not defined as a straight girl who is “in a phase,” especially if we go back to dating a

man after dating a woman. We discuss bierasure; my friend was rejected by a lesbian women at a bar after the woman found out my friend had been intimate with a man before. And especially, we share experiences on navigating how to feel validated in your sexuality when it seems to be in the eyes of others—constantly working to prove it to other people, (inside and outside of the bisexual community) as if their opinion matters at all. From personal experience, I have learned that someone else’s perception of you can heavily impact your own identity journey. The words of others are powerful and can make you spiral when you least expect it. If I had been interested in guys my whole life, and now knew I also wanted to be with girls (but haven’t actually been), then maybe I should’ve just considered myself straight and kept everything easy. I must’ve been thinking into it too much if I was still interested in men, right?

I have learned that bisexuality is like playing monkey in the middle. On one side, when I had never hooked up with a girl, I might as well have been considered straight, right? On the other, if my bisexual friend has only had sex with girls, she might as well be a virgin until she has had sex with a guy, right? From each side of the game, the bisexual person in the middle presents their sexuality differently. If I am dating a man, I must be straight. If I am dating a woman, I must be lesbian. I believed for so long that everyone else’s perception of my sexuality was the honest truth, instead of what I knew to be reality. Instead of listening to and accepting the identity decided by the bisexual person, others tend to project their perceived identity onto the person. This is due to the stigma and stereotypes surrounding the bisexual community and the consistent promotion of false narratives about bisexuality. When you are already struggling with the meaning behind your own sexual identity, the influx of ideas from others don’t help in building confidence. Instead, they only add to the confusion regarding self actualization and acceptance.

Have you hooked up with any girls? Today, I would have answered this question differently. Instead, I would look my ex dead in the eyes and say, “you would never ask me if I’ve hooked up with other guys since we broke up, why do you think you

get to ask me about girls?” Maybe, if I was in a particularly empowered mood, I would even go into a rage about how I am not a social experiment to probe. Either way, the point is that people who jump to conclusions about what does or does not constitute a typical expression of sexuality are not deserving of any explanation. Today, I can acknowledge that my ex asked me this question because he was confused on the varying appearances of bisexuality, but still, his question always pokes through the back of my mind. When entering new relationships and friendships, I beg his voice to stay quiet. I know that sexuality is not dependent on who I have hooked up with, but I only know this logically. In reality, myself and other bisexuals will always grapple with a lack of confidence that we sensibly know is not justified. Considering others’ perceptions is intoxicating. Maybe consulting “am I gay?” quizzes since a young age started this trend. But now, I wonder what the fuck virginity is and everything feels confusing and sometimes I want to be simple-brained like my ex.

I’d like to think there is a happily ever after to this whole mess (please no prince charming though), but sexuality will always be a little confusing. That being said, having this uncomfortable conversation with my ex was the start of me finally figuring it

by Claire Bletsas

As someone who’s nostalgiaprone, fall always brings on an extra dose of feelings. Maybe it’s the fact that the year will be coming to a close soon with winter

around the corner or the drop in temperature that has me craving warmer feelings. Or maybe there’s something in the air, I don’t know. But what I do know is that I have

a tendency to romanticize nearly everything in my life, sometimes to a fault, and autumn particularly lends itself to this habit. Crisp breezes call for the donning of

sweaters and hoodies.

Fire-bright leaves cover midwestern sidewalks. Suddenly, everything everywhere is pumpkin-flavored. There’s no mystery about why nature’s last hurrah before winter garners extra appreciation.

My life-long reverence of fall, though, is credited to more than just its aesthetic appeal. In my life, the season has always marked a time of transformation. A goodbye to the dog days of summer. A surrender of tank tops and jean shorts. A new field hockey season. Another birthday. A slate of new classes. This year—my final year of college—is the last time I’ll experience some of the traditions that have become hallmarks of fall: my last first day of school, the last time I’ll be able to stroll past the fall foliage on the Huron River, the last time I’ll step into the Big House as a Wolverine student. All I am able to picture are the endings. It’s like my mind is wired to suddenly forget the plot and instead conjure up the way everything comes to a close. Predictably, this has sent me into, what could fairly be called, a spiral

of nostalgia.

This year, fall has been marked not only by crisp breezes and leafcovered paths, but by a bittersweet air of reminiscence. I found myself needing an outlet for all this sentimentality, so I turned to my favorite creative device: Spotify.

I dug through years’ worth of playlists—nearly 150, legitimately—looking for songs that mirrored my moodiness. I pulled Bon Iver’s “Holocene,” a favorite from middle school that reminded me of long car rides around the Chicago suburbs to snowy field hockey tournaments. “Age of Consent” by New Order represented my early high school years when I had just gotten my driver’s license and giddily embraced my newfound independence. As I listened to “Feel Real” by Deptford Goth, I thought about my hometown best friend and all our hours sitting together in front of bedroom stereos when we still lived down the street from each other. MGMT’s “Congratulations” conjured up memories of my first fall on campus, walking to Italian 101 at 4 pm (every. single. day.)

from my dorm up on the Hill. Listening to P.H.F. and Clairo sing Queen brought me back to my sophomore year of college, characterized by endless hours of Zoom meetings that had replaced those brisk cross-campus walks. I can’t listen to “Happy Birthday” by Childish Major, SZA, and Isaiah Rashad, without hearing the voices of my best friends accompanying my shitty car stereo on our way home from a concert at midnight on my 21st birthday.

As I added “20 Something,” the final song on SZA’s Ctrl album, flashbacks flooded my vision. I saw myself on the Amtrak from Ann Arbor to Chicago, heading up to visit my best friends in Wisconsin for the football game the third week of freshman year. Sitting on that train, I finally had a moment to reflect on how I felt about my first few weeks of college. Dichotomously, the semester so far had left me both lonely and completely overstimulated. I lived in a dorm with nearly 1200 other freshmen and was on a campus of 40,000 students, but I didn’t have true friendships with any of them. I felt fundamentally older, living on my own for the first time, but I

also felt out of my depth. I longed to see my hometown best friends in Madison, but I also wanted to give them the impression that my life in Michigan was wonderful and dandy and not overwhelming at all.

I saw myself just a few months later, biking through the streets of my neighborhood in the midst of the pandemic. I listened to Ctrl front to back on that bike ride, lingering especially on “20 Something,” reflecting on and mourning my life in Ann Arbor that Covid had taken away.

I saw myself later that summer, sitting in the passenger seat of my then-girlfriend’s car and singing along to SZA. My life was falling back into place after Covid had uprooted it, and I had the distinct feeling of growing into myself as my queerness became visible to the world.

I saw myself at the end of my sophomore year, lying on my bed and listening to “20 Something” after arriving home from a weekend trip. The semester had just wrapped up, and my friends

and I celebrated by road-tripping to the Kentucky Derby. As I lay in my room, recovering from a weekend of alcohol and sunshine, I was filled with gratitude and pride that I had a car-full of friends to travel with. I felt like I was finally finding my place in Michigan.

Finally, I knew I had to add “Sarah” by Alex G, a song whose twangy chords reliably fill me with warmth and gratefulness for my circumstances and a complementary twinge of sadness that my life can’t be exactly like this forever. As I listen to the song now, the sadness is more than a twinge. It’s my senior year of college, and every day, my time left at Michigan feels more finite. But as I reflect on my years here so far—classmates turned best friends to share a midnight walk and bottle of wine with, once nameless Kerrytown streets that are now so familiar I can picture each house in my mind, time spent crying in libraries freshman year, awing at the upperclassmen who seemingly had it all together— that warmth is greater than ever. I know my life can’t be exactly like this forever, but

that’s okay. My life isn’t exactly like it was when I first listened to “Holocene,” “Age of Consent,” or “Congratulations”. I’ll never walk home from high school with my hometown best friend again, and sit on the floor listening to our shared playlists. I’ll never experience my 21st birthday again, surrounded by the voices of the college best friends I worried I’d never have. Eventually, a time will come when I can no longer walk out of my apartment building with my headphones on and wander the tree-lined streets of Ann Arbor. Eventually, my farmer’s market Saturday ritual will be just another memory evoked by a song on my “Fall Retrospective” playlist. And though that reality makes me feel a little sadder when I listen to “Sarah,” it also makes me feel so, so much more grateful for everything I love in my life that is exactly like this, for now.

LOOKING AT RELATIONSHIPS FROM THE A

OUTSIDE: PERSPECTIVE SINGLE

by Claire Emch

you thought would never hurt a fly are probably the most sinister. They mistake their kindness for entitlement.

So, I didn’t get the universal experience, but maybe that was a good thing. Because to be honest, it seemed like a fucking nightmare. I knew what I needed to know without actually having to go through it, which, not to pat myself on the back, was very emotionally efficient. I escaped the hell that was high school romance! Besides, I was never going to find my soulmate in a southern christian school of 200 people. College was where it actually counted. And baby, I came with the rulebook.

Note: all names have been changed in the following article.

What

is it about high school love that begs to be a universal experience?

Personally, I think it’s even more fun to see it unfold from behind protective glass. For my high school romance education, I had front row seats to the greatest serial monogamist of all time: my best friend.

When Lyla and I got to high school, it became clear that we were destined for different things. Every year, she had a routine: initiate talking-stage in the fall, make it official in the winter, break up over the summer. And I got to see the build-up, the heart-stopping gestures, and the bloody aftermath of screaming matches and messy, messy breakups. It felt like I was on the same emotional rollercoaster as her.

Not that I wanted to be. Lyla’s relationships were whirlwind romances with guys that all started out charismatic

and bold. She was always swept up in their obsession with her and the promise of a love story. We would stay up late when they first started talking and she would show me all the magical things they would say to woo her. It was thrilling and scary, and I remember feeling breathless. But, as beautiful as they started, they all ended painfully. Each of Lyla’s suitors taught me something new:

From Juan, I learned that guys with girl best friends cannot be trusted (a lesson I should definitely unlearn).

From Warren, I learned that if he got you because he’s very flirtatious, that behavior might not end just because you get in a relationship with him.

From Kaden, I learned that dating in secret is hot, but not sustainable.

From Johnathan, I learned that guys

Then I actually got here.

It just so happens that when you introduce your group of girl friends to the group of guys you met down the street, they’ll end up liking each other a lot more than you intended them to. Because (you guessed it), they’re all dating each other now. All of them. Which kind of stung. It brought up questions that didn’t feel super great to have sitting in my stomach. Questions that whispered why I was left out. Questions that squished me until I became smaller and weaker. I began wondering if I should take a step back from this coupled group before the questions got too loud.

But I remembered that I’d done this before. I was an amazing relationship confidant to Lyla and I could do that again for sure.

And really, it’s kind of amazing that they all met someone that compliments them perfectly. It really seems like it wouldn’t work, but it does. When Tara

is stressed with yet another exam she has, Ben knows just how to bombard her with crazier and crazier compliments until she can’t help but laugh. Nick and Elizabeth are wizards in the kitchen, trading spices and knives in a secret rhythm, like a synchronized tornado. We used to joke how Zane and Laura were polar opposites, but it turns out that they both share a secret love of working out that now has them joined at the hip. They all make sense in their own way. And it really hasn’t been a problem at all. Them finding happiness really does make me happy. It does. It really does. It truly and 100% does.

Except during moments like movie night.

It happened so quickly. I was watching a movie with them and scrolling on my phone because I can’t pay attention to anything these days. And halfway through, I look up and see Nick smoothing back Elizabeth’s hair. They look like they’re in their own world and Nick is looking at her like he’s obsessed with her, the way those boys were obsessed with Lyla, and I have to look away. But then I see Laura fall asleep and Zane putting her head on his shoulder. It’s really sweet. I’ve never seen Zane so sweet before. And I don’t know why I feel like this is too much because it’s not and it’s never been. Behind me, I hear Ben and Tara giggling and I want to cry so badly that I think I might die if I don’t.

It feels like I’m back in high school with Lyla and Warren in a movie theater this one Friday night. Lyla always asks me to go and I love to hang out with both of them. But I look over and they’re cuddled up together and I’m suddenly so aware that I’m here crashing a date. Now I’m crashing 3 dates at once. And I want to crawl into myself because I shouldn’t be here. I should be with someone. I should be normal.

Now I’m looking for answers. Because maybe this is a solvable issue. Maybe I just speak too softly or I chew with my mouth open. Or maybe it’s things I can’t change. Like my personality. My humor. My body.

And this is so pathetic and so, so stupid because this isn’t helping, but now I’m

consumed by it. It’s become a comfort to tick my flaws off one by one.

My stomach, my laugh, the way I talk.

My chin, my cheeks, my voice.

The most terrifying thing to think about is that the glass that I’ve used to take notes and hide behind is not as one sided as I thought. And maybe these couples have all been there, waiting to give me the answers that I’ve been asking for but don’t really want. Waiting to give me the real lessons that would break me to learn. Waiting to tell me that they can see what’s wrong with me, plain as day. They were just too nice to teach me why everything about me is undesirable.

I don’t know for certain if having some perfect high school romance would’ve made me feel less like curling into a ball all the time. Maybe I’d just inherently know that I was looked at and chased after. Maybe if I had the briefest of high school dating experiences I’d know that if it happened once then it could happen again, and I wouldn’t have to feel like my stomach drops every time I catch a glimpse of my friends.

But in moments like these, I like to console myself with the least consoling fact ever: I can’t change high school, I can only change how I look at things. After that night, I had to stop telling myself I was “rose-colored glasses adjacent.” I had to stop feeling like I was sitting on the sidelines of a better life than my own. I had to stop seeing romance as the only path to happiness. It sucks for a romantic to have to adopt a non-romantic view on life, but I hear genre-switching can really help a writer find a new perspective. Because I’ve never been in a serious relationship, I’ve been able to grow in ways that I’ve never thought possible. I’ve been free to explore scary stuff like writing, something I didn’t even think I was good enough to do until recently. I was able to learn how to take care of myself physically and mentally. And I’m not saying that you can’t do any of that in a relationship, but I know me, and I know that if I was in one right now, I wouldn’t have done any of these things.

I’ve always been embarrassed that I didn’t have a high school boyfriend and kept that a secret like it meant there was something wrong with me. I hoped that college would prove that intrusive thought wrong by giving me a romance, but I’ve realized that I don’t think a relationship could ever do that. I don’t know for sure, but looking back on my many years behind protective glass, I’m pretty sure that relationships don’t fix a person. Lyla’s insecurities were never magically removed by her boyfriends, nor was her life perfect because of them. Relying on the rose-colored glasses of a relationship to solve my problems is my problem.

Remember Juan, the very first of Lyla’s boys? I can almost picture the moment she came running down our street to tell me he had asked her out. It was the first time I felt like a spectator of other people’s more fantastic lives. Looking back, I wonder why I was so eager to ignore everything that was happening in my own life to focus on a freshman boy who couldn’t even shave properly.

I had to come to terms with the fact that the only way to stop being an observer was to stop telling myself that the only life worth living was a love story. But my own life, the life I’ve been ignoring—I’m excited to start living it on the other side of the glass.

Had I known sooner that I only loved myself when I felt perfect, I can’t say what I would’ve done. I’d like to say that I’d embrace the discovery, love myself through the realization, and tell myself that I couldn’t have known better for all those years I spent beating myself up over every single mistake I made. But I’d be lying. I can’t say what I would’ve

by Morgan Butler

done but I can say what I did do.

My freshman year of college was coming to a close. A little after warm weather made its way back to campus and people flooded outside to make up for lost time, I decided to go see a movie by myself. I don’t know why I didn't do so before. Living as an introverted film lover for much of my life, it seemed like

the perfect activity for me, myself, and I to enjoy together. When walking up and down State Street over the course of a few weeks, I saw the poster for The Worst Person in the World, a Norwegian film. The poster was enticing, not only for the title, but also for the woman positioned on the front who had the haircut I’ve been wanting for the last 5 years; effortless shoulder length locks

with chic curtain bangs. The film follows a young woman as she stumbles through love, life, and career. Prior to seeing the film, I was of the belief that I was not the kind of girl to ever stumble through anything. It’s something I would’ve prided myself on. Throughout high school I set big goals for myself and I achieved them. In short, I always met everyone’s expectations, especially my own.

Within the first 20 minutes of the film a montage plays out in which the main character is quickly characterized as reckless, or maybe just young. She cuts her hair, sleeps with her professor, commits to a career in photography but not all before changing her major multiple times. And with each decision she made, she held the conviction that each was right for her. She committed to each choice, as if it was the right thing to do and then changed her mind when she knew it no longer was. While watching the film, I began to realize that I wasn’t sure if I had committed to any decision with that much confidence. I always anticipated changing my mind before even giving myself the chance to find out by trying. I wasn’t sure if I had ever let myself make any “mistakes.” Meaning, I never let myself grow up, gain perspective, and change my mind without thinking that the end of the world was near. Thus began what I once labeled an identity crisis, but would now call a kind of awakening.

In many ways, all people embody some aspect of what is popularly regarded as “perfectionism.” The kind where your essay or your project is never quite right, no matter how many times you edit it. The kind in which you never even started in the first place for the fear that it won’t come out right. That’s what I had always dealt with, and when I came to college, that mindset leaked into the more personal parts of my heart. I couldn’t go on a date in fear that they weren’t “right” for me. I couldn’t join a club if the group didn’t seem “right” enough for me. I couldn’t make myself proud if I didn’t do it all “right.” It was debilitating.

But it was all I knew. If I wasn’t perfect, if I wasn’t meeting my own standards, how was I meant to like myself? How

was I meant to be happy with my life?

If I wasn’t doing everything right, if I wasn’t perfect, then who was I? I can recall crying in my dorm, telling my best friend that I had no idea who I was. Not only did I feel like I had no sense of self, but I felt stupid for spending so much time caring about so much that didn’t matter, caring about being “perfect” in the eyes of others. And also, for being a hypocrite. Whether or not I wanted to admit it, I spent most of high school and my freshman year of college under the impression that I had figured my life out.

I knew who I was, what I liked, and who I was going to be. Now all I knew was that the way I had been living my life was no longer sustainable. How could I go back to craving perfection when the prospect of making mistakes was so freeing?

I spent a few days ruminating, crying, and questioning my life before relaying it all to my therapist. She asked me to consider, had I had everything figured out at 18, how boring would the rest of my life be? She challenged me to think of this as a chance for development rather than a crumbling of identity.

She and I talked about self-compassion over self-improvement before, but in all honesty, I thought it was a crock of shit. I thought successful people had to be hard on themselves in order to succeed, and I mistook meeting the standards set by my own perfectionism as confidence. But, that kind of confidence falters when faced with mistakes. Rather than believe in my own abilities and recognize that it was impossible to never mess up, I instead reacted by breaking down. One question wrong in Spanish class was more than one question wrong. It was a reflection of something missing deep within me and meant I had lost all the worth I placed in never doing wrong. It meant I was worthless.

I can’t say when my perspective really changed, it’s not that kind of thing. Instead, I can say that like many other things in my life, it was gradual and it involved making new decisions each day. It meant self-awareness and allowing the support of those I choose to surround myself with. I needed this realization to embrace change and risk as opportunities to discover what I want and who I am, and not as moments of

self-loathing and contempt. I chose to start loving myself as I love my friends and family. I chose to approach mistakes with less criticism and more understanding. I chose to give myself the space to fuck up both the big and little. I chose to give myself a chance to like things I had decided I wasn’t the “type” for. I let myself change.

That’s where I found love. Found, because it was not always there and it took time to come to that point. Most painfully, I found it in the hardest of moments. I found it when it felt most tested. When I failed a test in Spanish I fought the urge to crawl under the covers and hope that I would rot into my bed sheets before anyone discovered I was a fraud. I talked myself down and spoke to myself as if I were my own friend. I wasn’t a failure. One test didn’t define me. Next time I’ll study some more. I found love when I had a bad day and couldn’t get out of bed for hours. I asked myself to respect my own feelings, my own troubles, my own depression. I helped myself get to the shower and if I didn’t make it there, I thanked myself for trying. I found love when I felt unwanted and uncared for by a person I gave everything to. I traded in their validation and potential for my time, emotions, and sense of self. I made myself abandon what wasn’t right for me, at the cost of my own comfort. I learned to value myself more than the things I had always assigned value to. Grades, griefs, and guys never made up what makes me.

Had you told me a year ago that I would be making my roommate laugh when she watches me whisper “I love me” to my reflection, I would have told you “Of course I do!” But I would’ve been lying. I could’ve said it all I wanted, but I never would've meant it. Love for oneself is not conditional on whether or not you’re meeting the bar you set. It’s not the high of passing Spanish after nights of disgust at your own lack of productivity. Love for oneself is the acceptance and care you offer to yourself even when you don’t like who you are, or when you fail, or when someone makes you feel unworthy.

I may not have known sooner what was best for me, but I found out just in time.

c a n ’ t b e a V i l l ainAnymore

I was 14 years old when I turned my mental illness into a superpower. In a very Read it and Weep style move, I wrote a character that was the strongest version of myself. She was 19, two inches taller than my measly 5’4”, and she could break reality with her panic attacks. She had flashback nightmares that provided just the right information to advance the plot. When she dissociated, she could even enter other peoples’ minds. I named her Morgan, because I thought it sounded tough. I gifted her every bit of trauma I’d ever experienced and, though it weighed on her, she kept going. Until it became too much to bear.

Morgan appears in 6 different stories I have written. Every one of them ends the same way—with Morgan using her powers to kill everyone else and then herself. I turned her into a villain and weaponized her trauma. I created versions of every boy who’d ever shoved me into a locker and every adult who’d failed to protect me, and I had Morgan crush their brains like a Danimals yogurt cup. Very quickly, I found myself addicted to the catharsis of her violence.

I don’t think I studied in my first two years of high school. Ever. And it’s not like I didn’t need to. I just was utterly incapable of opening my computer without pulling up my latest Morgan story. Once the writing was in front of my face, I couldn’t stop. There were many nights when I

quite literally wrote until I passed out. I wrote until my face turned red from a strange combination of exhaustion and the hopefully harmless UV rays emitted by my screen. I wrote during class and through lunch. I stopped remembering if I’d had a conversation with a real person or written one with their equivalent character. But eventually, the punch of the stories started to fade, and I let it. My middle school revenge plots had gone somewhat stale, and I wanted to try something with less cheesy supernatural elements the next time around.

When I moved away from writing fantasy in later high school years, I thought that would be the end of Morgan and her villainy. She didn’t fit in well with the new realistic romance-dramas I was writing then, so I came up with new heroes (they were heroes this time around). One character shared a bit of Morgan’s ruthlessness, and another had the same sense of humor she’d shown in her few softer moments, but Morgan herself was absent from my writing for years. The stakes were lower and the stories were significantly less bloody. Most of them were never finished. My writing became much more frivolous and fun, but it never sparked the same feverish need to continue that I had felt when I wrote Morgan’s stories.

That feeling only returned to me last winter, when I became

Trigger Warning: Suicidality, Mental Illness

evil again. Or rather, when I convinced myself I was evil. I was 19 (the same age that Morgan was), 5’6” (the height I’d always listed for her), and I was at my psychological breaking point. I was turning into the character I’d written so many times. It felt like a prophecy coming true. Every day, I woke up wondering if it would be the day I finally snapped, as she inevitably did. Luckily, that never happened but the thought scared the shit out of me. Nowhere is that clearer than in the 40,000-word prose poetry suicide note I composed during the winter semester.

Cutting Parts, as I came to call the project, is an account of my own intense paranoia, obsessive tendencies, eating disorder, trauma, and social difficulties. It’s a twisted sort of diary filled with wordplay. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written and it kind of broke me. In the past, I had always used Morgan as a way to deal with emotions that were too scary to handle myself. She was the one that was angry, not me. She was crazy, but she was just a work of fiction. She was an exaggeration, and I took great comfort in the distance between us. But in Cutting Parts, that dividing wall began to fade as I finally took ownership over my own anger. I wrote about my life and experiences as myself. I stopped hiding behind a character and I tried to embrace the emotions that had led to her creation.

Unfortunately, after years of externalizing my worst feelings, I had absolutely no idea how to deal with them. It’s actually quite easy to see my mind beginning to reckon with that problem in the first chunk of Cutting Parts. One section about my irritation with a friend would inevitably be followed by four or five that go back and forth on whether or not that irritation was fair. Writing became omnipresent in my life again as I always felt a need to write some new passage that would argue against the points of an old one. I downloaded the Google Docs app on my phone and wrote during every spare minute I had. I ran into more than one wall that semester because my gaze was so tied to my phone screen. This addiction seemed even stronger than the one I had felt when writing about Morgan. Back then, I had been writing for the catharsis. But now, I was writing to justify my own actions, my very existence.

I was a different person at 19 than I was at 14. Even though I am slightly embarrassed by her, I know that Morgan was very helpful to my younger self. But she was not what I needed last year. I spent so long writing this evil version of myself that it warped my self-image dramatically. I am a flawed person, but I wasn’t walking around controlling people’s thoughts or killing for the fun of it. At the time, though, I felt like my little missteps were the most terrible things a human had ever done. I was convinced that I was a villain and not one that would get a redemption arc. At 14, that would have delighted me. But at 19, I cared enough about the world around me to want to spare them from my horrible self.

For a few months, I tried hard to fight back against the creeping sensation that I would have to be defeated. Every story I had ever finished had ended with the death of a fallen protagonist, usually Morgan, and I was pretty convinced that I was becoming the exact character I had always killed off, or at least the written version of myself was. Unlike Morgan, the protagonist and narrator of Cutting Parts was unabashedly me and that narrator had written some pretty terrible stuff, villainous wishes that seemed so inconsistent with values I knew I had. I knew it was a bad thing to want others to suffer, but I

wanted it anyway. I wrote pages about that same desire for revenge that had always driven Morgan to her breaking point in her stories, but this time it wasn’t Morgan that was bloodthirsty. It was me. There was no more character to kill now, only myself, and I could feel the conclusion of my story approaching.

But, before I ended it, I gave myself a chance to prove that I was still a good person. After all, I only needed to kill myself if I had become a villain. So, in an effort to spare my own life, I tried to be good. I asked out the nicest guy I knew. I bought people gifts, listened patiently as they talked about their problems into the wee hours of the night, and planned fun, wholesome activities for my friends to do together. But, since I knew I was only behaving that way for what I believed were selfish reasons, my brain saw any kindness or generosity as a form of selfishness. Eventually, things came crashing down. I stopped believing that I could do anything good without an ulterior motive lurking behind it. I got rejected (very gently) by the aforementioned guy and convinced myself it was because he saw straight through the “good” front I was putting up to my dark core. I remember hyperventilating in my room more than once because I was afraid that I had accidentally hurt someone’s feelings. I didn’t want to be evil. Being evil meant being Morgan and being Morgan meant I would have to kill myself, as she always had. I wasn’t ready to die quite yet.

When the semester ended and I stopped having new, distracting moments to write about, the suicidal thoughts got even stronger. I was miles away from the friends I had been so afraid I was hurting and couldn’t look over and see a smile that confirmed they were still happy to have me around. I stopped getting feedback from my environment and my brain started to extrapolate in the worst ways it could. It was like looking at life through a funhouse mirror. I couldn’t remember which things were big and which were small. It seemed to change every time I moved even a hair’s breadth. I couldn’t tell when I was being evil and when I was perfectly normal, and I was utterly terrified that I would do something bad without even knowing it.

I have always been a girl with an annoyingly vivid memory. But I know I do not remember last year correctly. Nor do I remember most of a very specific night from this June when I wrote a document simply titled “Addendum.” I believe I intended it to accompany Cutting Parts and to explain that I didn’t blame any of my loved ones for my suicide.

Obviously, I didn’t die this past June. But I’m still working through the issues that led me to almost kill myself. I’ve been trying to figure out how to hold myself accountable without punishing myself for every tiny misstep I make. I’m particularly bad at giving myself permission to be angry—at seeing anger as something natural and not inherently evil. Accepting that sometimes my actions and boundaries will hurt other people, without it being my fault, is even more difficult. I’ve moved on to a new writing project, though. I think I’m going to let both Cutting Parts and Morgan sit untouched in the basement of my brain for a while. Both of those projects mean a lot to me and I feel that I owe quite a bit to both of them as well, but using writing as a coping mechanism rather than letting it remain a passion tends to get me into trouble. I know that I am probably going to continue to make mistakes throughout my life and sometimes I will hurt other people. I know that is by no means special. Now, I just have to get myself to believe it’s okay.

by Isabella Oh

The Unattainability of Being the Main Character

Watch this TikTok to find products for the perfect blowout, or save this Instagram post of the perfect weekend getaway, or even like this Youtube video with a perfect what I eat in a day. We’ve been idealizing this concept of being perfect, void of imperfections or flaws. The rise of platforms like TikTok and Instagram have enabled us to see how others romanticize their lives, whether it be for inspiration or for envy, for better or for worse. Through trends like taking pictures to find out if you’re photogenic and dieting hacks to getting a bikini body, or even just the overarching fear of irrelevance, we’ve been taught to perceive our lives as something more digestible, or in other words, easier to live through. But with this romanticization comes a backlash effect of creating a pressure to constantly be striving for the unattainable. Our obsession with creating and presenting this perfect lifestyle, an endless cycle of striving for an unmeasurable aesthetic, has created a byproduct: a fear of normalcy and the mundane. No longer are we able to live through life as it is, only an altered and much more glamorized life.

Everyone likes to talk about themselves—what they did this past weekend, what they’ve been doing at work, the new partner they’ve been seeing; if it’s not about themselves then they don’t want anything to do with it. This selfdriven nature was thrust into the spotlight with social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. All of a sudden, everyone was able to show millions of people around the world their lives and why others should want to live it. This concept has evolved over time, as even within the specificity of social media, there’s been transformation on how best to proclaim yourself as the “main character.” Initially, it was all about showing off your lavish lifestyle through carefully curated collections of brand clothing, expensive vacations, photoshopped selfies, and more. But now, presenting your true “natural” self has taken precedence. Now, it’s all about catching moments of coincidental perfection. Gone are the facetuned and photoshopped galleries and in their place, come quirky and filter-free, photo dump candids. As all social media platforms have become flooded with maintaining effortlessness, it’s placed an expectation on everyone to live “the perfect life.” These rose-colored glasses through

which we are consuming the daily lives of others online means everything seems more appealing and coveted then it actually is, which also makes it unattainable as a result. People are constantly looking at aspects of other people’s lives to replicate for themselves; they push themselves towards an unattainable perfection and post about it, continuing the cycle all while presenting an artificial version of themselves. This romanticization means that everything, from your dinner to your bathroom countertop, must also serve a function; if every single aspect of your life is not furthering this false narrative of being a main character, it feels like it’s unproductive. Normal everyday tasks, whether it be doing laundry or getting your homework done, seem undoable unless they’re altered into a unique experience, making us fear the notion of living a mundane life. This fear drives us to worry that others will perceive us as normal, as human, as people who just live with nothing greater and nothing less. Everyone wants what they can’t have, so the notion of being perfect, although quite impossible, leaves everyone feeling empty and reaching towards something they cannot grasp.

Despite this toxic aspiration for perfection, there’s something almost romantic about getting yourself through the day—something special about taking the time to enhance your routine to make it just a little more bearable. But the distinction between the two, an unattainable aesthetic and taking the time to appreciate the little things, is the difference between refusing anything but perfection and accepting mere betterment. Romanticizing your life shouldn’t be done to make others see it; it should be done for and by yourself. You should be the only one wearing your version of rose-colored glasses, not forcing others to put theirs on to look at you. With this approach, we’re still able to see the good and break up the monotonous routine of our days, while staying authentic to who we are. While being the main character may be unattainable, what’s not is sticking to your page and writing your own story.

Our lives are not something that always needs to be improved, bettered, or changed. Life can sometimes simply just be. We can stop this constant pressure to be something or someone we’re not and instead, take the pockets of peace in our life and choose to enjoy them for what they are. Nothing in your life needs to be romanticized. It just has to be lived.

“Como agua para chocolate”

“Como agua para chocolate” “Como agua para chocolate”

(like water for chocolate)

In the Spanish-speaking world, an expression you may hear from older generations is that someone is “como agua para chocolate,” meaning that their emotions are on the verge of boiling over the limit. The phrase itself comes from the process in many Spanish-speaking countries, especially Mexico, where hot chocolate is made with boiling water; if you add too much, you risk turning something sweet into something that can cause you unbearable pain.

A social stigma against being “overly” emotional is not unique to Mexico, nor the Spanish-speaking world. Rather, it is almost universally shared among cultures, and it is agreed that emotions, for the most part, are a sign of immaturity or weakness. The question that should be posed, however, is if being excessively emotional is truly a bad thing.When one thinks of strong emotions, what often comes to mind is uncontrollable sadness or anger. This belief, however, leaves behind the driving factor that has

by Eli Merren

historically been responsible for wars, love, unity, murder, and peace all at once: passion.

While being passionate about one’s work or romantic partner is embraced culturally and publicly, my own experiences lead me to believe that this passion, perceived as productive and admirable, is—albeit unconsciously—defined in a different way than the passion responsible for dramatic illicit affairs and runaway lovers. In my mind, there seems to exist two “passions” in society; one that is constructive yet predictable, and another that is much more carnal and wildly unpredictable. The latter type of passion is best summarized by its instinctual nature, one that

The countless folktales, anecdotes, sayings, and more spread across all world cultures warn against being passionate in moments where society deems it inappropriate, resulting in one being branded as hasty, irrational, or immature. What immediately comes to mind as I write this is a boy swallowing his reason and declaring his love for his sweetheart, or perhaps the classic story of Romeo and Juliet—a story which, ironically, certainly serves as a critique of passion. In these instances, it can be argued by those with a realist perspective that the boy was acting embarrassingly, and that Romeo and Juliet were far too hasty in their actions. Regardless

moment, something which can easily dull life to the point of nihilism if followed strictly.

I would argue, however, that being blinded by the heat of the moment and having passion cloud your inhibition is not as bad as it may seem. Life will never be a linear and comfortable journey from start to finish. Truly, our existence is more or less a game where great risk can lead to great reward, or perhaps great failure. There will be times where you fall, and then fall again, until it feels that you cannot fall any further. Despite this, the fleeting time that we share on this Earth is a gift that can never be repaid in full unless you allow yourself to be driven by what fills you with passion.

At the risk of seeming tacky, I would like to request

that played around me, and I wore what made me feel amazing. I told myself stories while leaves fell around me during the fall and I created new constellations when I looked at the sky. And yes, I allowed myself to fall in love. Do not misunderstand my experience, dear reader. I have been hurt more times than I can count, and sometimes I consider rebuilding the shell I used to live inside. For each time I am hurt, however, I am healed soon after by the pursuit of the eternal passion I chase.

So, live a little. Go to that party and lose yourself in the crowd; kiss that person you have been waiting for; wear that outfit and love yourself unconditionally. In the end, you may find that you’ve been burned. You may also find, however, something even sweeter than chocolate.

Prologue:

There are days when I can’t breathe. A kind of pressure weighs down on me, a constant tightness in my chest expanding with every sharp inhale. It’s like when you’re swimming in the ocean and a wave pushes you beneath the surface. Water rushes in through your nose, suffocating you. You keep flailing your limbs, kicking and kicking to propel yourself upwards before you lose control.

There are days when I want to stop kicking.

I feel it during junior year of high school in quarantine when I haven’t seen my friends in so long that I wonder if I can still call them my friends. I feel it more when funerals and hospital visits inflict pain on my family, but I feel it most when I am only adding to their pain instead of making them feel better. When my actions draw out tears from my mother’s eyes or disappointed glances from my father’s face, when my words seem to cause the most harm. I feel a gut-wrenching pain watching myself push everyone around me away when all I truly want is to pull them closer.

I often reminisce about my childhood. I miss spending my time either outside surrounded by the beauty of nature or tucked in my blanket, reading adventurous books. I would envision myself as the main character, exploring the world of my backyard while running barefoot through the green grass in a fit of laughter as its soft tips tickle the sides of my feet. I miss basking in the rays of the bright, yellow sun that spread warmth throughout my body and tracing with my finger the path of light from the golden stars against the deep blue sky. Life was so easy, so colorful back then. Now, most of the color seems to have been drained. Closed curtains, bleak walls, and faded white Zoom screens replace the once colorful aura with a somber gray tint.

Perhaps, life is more challenging because I am less naive. As a child, I used to believe in the magic of life, but I have experienced too much of life to be disillusioned by such ideas anymore. Through stolen glimpses of dangers kept hidden from us for most

by Ruhi Gulati

of our childhood, I lose faith in happy endings like the ones from the bedtime stories I used to enjoy. I now know of the worsts of the world; I have seen loss, sickness, loneliness, hate, fear, and sadness— especially sadness.

Perhaps, there is also less magic when life is so predictable, when my daily quarantine routine is always the same. It can be hard to find meaning in monotony. Each day of junior year in quarantine moves in a continuous cycle—the pounding of my alarm awakens me right before class, the meals I heat up in the microwave all taste the same, and the piles of homework and SAT practice hold me hostage. I spend the entire day locked in my bedroom lit only by the faint light of my computer screen. At night, I finally lay my head on my pillow only for it to rise six hours later. And the cycle repeats itself, again and again. Each day adds more to the growing weight on my chest, making me feel trapped, and the walls seem to close in on me until all of the air has vanished.

Until I can’t breathe.

Chapter 1:

WRITING MYSELF AS THE MAIN CHARACTER

I slowly begin to separate my body from my mother’s grasp. She is starting to cry, and she is not ready to let me go. I am ready though. I want to move forward from the past two years of my life trapped in the pandemic. I am ready for my freshmen year—a chance at a fresh start in a new place, surrounded by new people and a newfound sense of independence. I look at this year as an opportunity to change my mindset and break out of the cycle I felt trapped in.

I am almost at the door of the main entrance of Mary Markley when I decide to look back. I wish I didn’t—the image of my mother standing and waving to me with tears streaming down her face, is ingrained in my memory.

I picture her whenever I am having fun, and I immediately feel guilty. My mother worked extremely hard to get to where she is today and it’s because of her that I am here today at my dream school, preparing for my dream career. I want to be able to make her proud and make the most out of my education, but I sometimes feel guilty that I am receiving the opportunities she never had. I wonder if I should be back at home in case she needs me.

I also picture her whenever I need her, which is

more often than I predicted. I need her to stroke my forehead and tuck me into my blanket when I feel so sick that I cannot stop coughing. To fetch me ice to stop the throbbing pain when I sprain my ankle. To hold my hair when I vomit into the little trash can in the corner of my dorm room. To remind me to eat on days when I don’t think I deserve it. To wipe the tears from my cheek when I cannot stop crying. I need her to help me through all of the unexpected challenges I have faced in college thus far.

I need her in moments when sinister clouds block all light and unleash an army of ice-cold rain. Droplets feel like bullets, penetrating the ground’s surface and opening wounds I thought were healed. The downpour reminds me of before, how I almost drowned in the current of the ocean. When my legs grew tired of kicking, when the rush of the water almost stole my breath.

But, this time, the storm passes, and the pain washes away.

For the first time in my life, I am faced with the hard truth that I am completely alone. When I felt sick, I took care of myself. When I sprained my ankle, I went to the hospital by myself. When I threw up, I cleaned up after myself. Being able to face these challenges alone has brought me the strength to overcome them, to move past my feelings of sadness.

The storm is not like before; it’s not continuous. This time, I recover.

Sometimes, a myriad of colors from red to indigo stretches across the sky, reminding me there is no rainbow without rain. I realize that it is normal to feel sad and healthy even if you let the sadness go and move on.

Because life gets better.

And there is still so much left to experience. There are new songs to blast in your car. New books to binge all in one night. New people to meet that could change your life. And new versions of yourself you haven’t met yet.

Chapter 2:

I now believe there is still magic left in this world. It is simply about how you choose to see it. Perhaps, happy endings in bedtime stories are not always real, but the beauty of life’s journey captured by your favorite movies and books is. Main characters face obstacles, but then they rise above them. Stories would never be interesting without these moments, so turn every challenge presented your way into a plot point. As a child, I used to have a large imagination. Who’s to say we can’t incorporate that imagination into our adult life?

You are the director of your own movie, the author of your own story, so write yourself as the main

character. Play your favorite song as you stroll through campus, gazing at the beautiful trees painted with a kaleidoscopic range of fall colors from deep maroon to bright citrus. Stay up past midnight to listen to Taylor Swift’s new album in your friends’ dorm room, lit only by her golden fairy lights and the shine of the stars while sipping from a rose-colored drink. Be spontaneous and wander along the streets with friends you just met, wearing your favorite black dress that mirrors the inky night sky. Call your parents whenever you’re crying, curled up in your chair by the window, observing the misty, soft blue hue cast from the light drizzle outside. And call them whenever you’re excited about a new opportunity while sitting at a bench at the Law Quad surrounded by its Hogwarts-esque stone walls.

Set up a hammock between the forest green trees underneath the cerulean sky decorated with powdery clouds and read a new book. And if you don’t like the ending, then change it. Every page turned is a lesson learned, so always keep turning the pages.

Chapter 3:

I ruminate on all of this on the train back home to Chicago over fall break. Traveling back to a place representative of my old self brings back so many emotions. However, as I peer outside the window of the Amtrak at the blur of fall leaves and the cute, little houses of every color while my favorite song, Taylor Swift’s “Mirrorball,” plays in my ear, I realize that I will be okay. Living as the main character of my own life has taught me how to overcome challenges. By romanticizing my life, I can make the most out of every moment.

As I step out of the train and a gust of wind brushes my face, I take a second to soak in the yellow rays of the sun and the bright blue light reflecting off the skyscrapers and the Chicago River.

And then I take a deep breath.

The Covid-19 pandemic relabeled healthcare workers as “heroes,” individuals putting others’ needs before their own. Frontline healthcare workers became “brave soldiers” overnight. Signs lionizing their work efforts and proclaiming a kind of hero worship appeared in front yards and businesses across the United States. Yet, these signs blind the population from the structural failures exposed during the pandemic and slapped a heavy layer of foundation on the faces of healthcare workers to hide the damage to their bodies. There is nothing brave about facing unsafe working conditions, lacking proper PPE, or not receiving protection from workplace violence.

We work or risk losing our jobs, salaries, and livelihoods if we quit. The glorification of healthcare workers binds us to an industry that disempowers us until we burn out. We don’t want to be heroes. We want to be treated properly by our patients, their families, and the healthcare system.

I started working in healthcare when I was 19 years old. And over the following two years, I have been bitten, scratched, punched, kicked, choked, sexually assaulted, and verbally harassed by the patients and their family members. The bruises and scars may have faded into my skin, but when I take off my scrubs and mask and look in the mirror, I still see them. The black eye. The handprints on my arms, breasts, shoulders, and neck. The bruising on my legs and abdomen. The scabbed-over scratches that have failed to peel. The teeth marks on my right bicep. The screaming of obscenities, sexuallycharged statements, and death still ring in my ears. The fatigue is now permanently carved into my bones. My skin is caked in urine, feces, saliva, viral and bacterial particles, tears, blood, and other bodily fluids, regardless of my attempts to wash them away by scrubbing my skin till patches of redness appear. I want to cry, sitting on the shower floor until the hot water runs cold. Screaming internally to the choir that forever holds their peace. Only myself and God speaking. I am not religious though, so I repeat my thoughts to my therapist later for good measure.

My psychiatrist stated that I developed mild Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from my working conditions. Physical and mental health deterioration? Damn, double homicide. My bed becomes my safe space after shifts. I spend hours lying in bed, simmering in a vat of anxiety and guilt, especially if a shift was particularly difficult. Irritable and moody, I remain isolated from my friends and family. Mentally berating myself for not responding to calls fast enough, not caring enough, not acting independently enough. Losing sleep from

intrusive thoughts and compulsive fear of medical errors and faulty charting. Unattached and aloof walking to work, dread seeping under my skin as I step onto my unit and accept my shift assignment. A letter of resignation sitting in my email drafts, lying in wait for the day I finally build the courage to click send.

enough to advocate for healthcare reform for workers. Advocate for healthcare workers by supporting federal legislation, including the SAVE Act, which protects healthcare employees from assault and intimidation. Support legislation similar to the Safe Patient Care Act that limits forced overtime and reduces staff-to-patient ratios. Call your senators in support of the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act that has been sitting in the Senate since April 2021. This act requires the Department of Labor to address workplace violence in healthcare and other social services. Most importantly, treat us kindly. If not with respect, then with patience. We are doing our absolute best with the resources available to us.

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The truth is I am not alone either. Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, 44% of nursing staff in 2022 have experienced physical violence and 68% have experienced verbal abuse. Examples include a patient grabbing a nurse and kicking her in the ribs. Another nurse was thrown against a wall and bitten by a patient. A medical student was dragged on the ground, leaving her hands bleeding and her legs bruised. 57% of healthcare workers experienced severe mental health issues during and after the height of the pandemic in 2022, including PTSD and Major Depression Disorder. Symptoms of which persisted even after a period of absence from work. In 2021, 13% of nursing staff in the United States reported suicide ideation or actions of self-harm, and 91% of nursing staff reported one instance of sexual assault in 2021 alone. Federal legislation does not exist to protect healthcare staff from sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, only a few state-by-state laws or workplace regulations exist to ensure the physical and psychological safety of healthcare workers. Hospital systems across the United States fail to advocate for mental healthcare among healthcare workers, instead using pizza parties and massage chairs as temporary fixes for our crumbling sanity. Deteriorating physical and mental health among staff only decreases patient care standards, leading to injury and death in extreme cases.

Multiple reasons exist to explain our continued employment even with the abuse. Some healthcare workers consider the time, money, and effort they spend on their training, which depends on the career they pursue. Others stay to advocate for patients by connecting their patients with social services, navigating health insurance together, and providing holistic care. A third group, one I identify with, works for the small moments in which we connect with others during the worst moments of life. Some of my small moments include: walking through the hospital courtyard, learning about horticulture from a patient who would not live to see the end of the month, bonding over hockey with a man who would die five days later, playing cards with a woman who believes the year is 1935, and comparing music with my coworkers while agreeing that one nurse has the worst taste ever. More reasons exist, of course. But I have noticed these three groups are simply the most prevalent.

Calling us heroes and glorifying our jobs is not

Jaded, broken, empathy falling second to indifference; I regret the day I signed up to become a healthcare worker. Few positives frame the job as worth the pain. The bad outweighing the good in my experiences. A career in nursing no longer appeals to me, but I have found a passion for advocacy. I plan to pursue a graduate education that will allow me to enhance community health by translating empirical findings into health practice and policy. To think I wanted nothing more than to become a healthcare worker when I was 19 years old. Once excited by the prospects of helping others, now mourning my old naivete. My job is meaningful to me, but without reform—protections for workers, an end to mandated overtime, safer staffto-patient ratios, and mental healthcare for workers, among others—I will be burned out before the end of next year.

Aisle 10

A girl stands in aisle ten of the local Walgreens. To her left, in front of the tampons and pads, stands a woman who is watching the girl with contempt. To her right, a young man looks at sex toys. He, too, steals disappointed glances at the girl. The girl is not looking at tampons or sex toys; she is simply browsing a shelf of condoms.

She reads each individual description, words like, “ultra ribbed,” “extra sensitive,” and “super thin” written in bold lettering alongside small boxes. These words mean nothing to her. They’re not supposed to, anyway. They are for men.

She notices other shoppers staring at her, the young girl in the condom aisle. She did this on purpose. She wants them to see her defying expectations, and it feeds her pride to know their disgust. This is a message she wants them to see.

She scans the shelf again and lands on bright pink.

A singular blushing box in the sea of dark purples and blacks and golds.

“For Her” it says.

She considers what she wasn’t exactly taught, but what every girl is expected to know—

Buying condoms is a boy’s job.

Wanting sex, enjoying sex, is for men.

Sex is something done to women, not for them.

It is to satisfy the other. So she looks at the condoms again. These are for her, why shouldn’t she get them?

Why should she be ashamed of doing what men get praised for?

In one swift moment, the box is in her hands and she heads straight for check-out.

The girl does not have plans to tear open the pink packaging. But she could, and foreseeing an opportunity where she gets to be the one to provide a condom when needed is enough for her. But, that isn’t the purpose of her visit. Instead, she craves the adrenaline rush that comes with exploring your sexuality as a young girl and acting on it. She wants everyone to witness her deviation from the norm. Girls do not buy condoms. This girl does.

The old man seems flustered while bagging her one item.

“Stay safe,” he says. “Always am,” she replies innocently, as she exits the store with satisfaction.

by Koralynn Kennedy

by Isabel Hopson

WANTING

People who are disgusted by a color tend to have unpleasant memories associated with it. I grew up hating the color pink. My memories are of love.

Love is unpleasant.

The lead singer of the band Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Sam Melo, is a Southern son of missionaries. Melo allows both faith and uncertainty to shape his songwriting. The singer is motivated by spiritual warfare, his confidence in the power of possession.

Pushing our way into the crowded car, my friends and I took up all the space we could in the bodies of fifteen year old girls. As high schoolers in Chicago, the train was our only source of mobility. The more people in a car, the stronger the silence.

Commuting workers and the stench of vodka split us. We packed in where we could, the heaviness of shared laughter shifting into light, quiet smiles as the train door slid shut. The boy behind me must’ve known we were on our way home from a theater because he tapped my shoulder, smiled, and made me feel like a girl in a movie. There wasn’t enough room to move or even speak, the only air left was reserved for breath. I chose to keep breathing.

I felt wanted.

Pink, when worn loudly, produces feelings of weakness, childishness, and innocence.

RKS opened their song “Hide” with a message for God: “See, I’ve been praying for a signal or a sign that you haven’t sent.” As a child, I wanted to believe in God more than I was actually able to. I, too, asked for explanations. Every night, I sought acceptance.

I spent the summer before third grade at my grandparents in Michigan. My brother and I loved those weeks where our feet touched more grass in one day than ever before in Chicago. One morning, the neighbors wanted to play pretend. I was a prince, eagerly handing over my femininity. I shoved it down so quickly, I almost threw up when I asked the princess to marry me.

There is a shade of pink called “Baker-Miller Pink” which has been used in the walls of prisons to pacify inmates. The shade, “Cool Down Pink” has been used similarly. A popular explanation is that the shades are associated with femininity and in turn humiliate male prisoners. Is pink considered tranquilizing because women are tranquil? Or is the color associated with women because both are the same? I suppose it does not matter. Either reveals inferiority.

A shaky, handheld camera opens to multiple shots of life in New Orleans in RKS’ “Hide” music video. A house, a passing car, a man’s voice, children playing. The images trace from moving hands, to eyes, to mouths, to smiles, as drag queens get ready. Visually, identities are put into perspective: as characters in an extensive, empty world.

In eighth grade my school had a harassment problem. A group of girls, my friends, got together each day at lunch and talked with our favorite teacher about the social environment. One day he asked who had experienced the grabbing, the laughter. The reputation of this group allowed them to speak on behalf of all the other girls, and I followed loyally. The hands around me shot up slowly. I say ‘shot up’ because there was no chance their path would change trajectory and ‘slowly’ because they had to feign hesitancy. A friend’s pitying hand guided mine into the air.

“Hey, I’m sure they touched you too.”

They hadn’t. I was filled with embarrassment. And I am still embarrassed of the embarrassment. I failed the ultimate test of desire: I didn’t make others lose control. I wasn’t worthy. Though I tried, I couldn’t understand why I should want to be weak.

My favorite marker in elementary school was the pink expo marker. When asked to write on the whiteboard, I always chose blue. I was already girl enough.

Melo is again faithful: “The Son of Man had me in his clutches. The Son of Man had me in his clutches. The sons of men pulled me to the touch and I loved it.” He is possessed. His love has no choice.

The girls in my classroom that day of eighth grade were already intensely hated by all who knew them. I knew that because everyone smiled around them, and they were always celebrated in games of spin-the-bottle. Teachers chose them as group leaders and boys chose them to meet their girl quota in games of kickball. My god they were hated.

I was the group’s “personality” as I was informed, and didn’t loathe them for developing before the rest of the grade. I saw them as inspirational. We each had something the other needed.

I saw something profoundly distressing, for the first of many times, that afternoon. Masked by pride, sorrow filled the eyes of every girl around me. Every girl in that room was weighed down by either the dangers of their desirability or their longing to be in peril.

Each girl admitted to falling prey. Nothing happened after that.

In Hindu tradition, desire is an unavoidable human truth, but also emulates sin and destroys the competence of man. Within Christianity, tradition is upheld as a means to regulate desire, started by Adam and Eve themselves. Fear is the possibility of desire, or lack thereof, and happiness the fulfillment of desire. Desire drags pain permanently alongside it.

We’ve all been raised to hate women. It was not only me.

Remembering the discovery of his own sexuality, Melo recalled, “I exploded and cried. Three days of, ‘what is happening?!’ The waves of emotion were intense for me.” His revelation was sudden and debilitating. He had stopped writing weeks before and suddenly recognized himself among the bullied of his childhood. In writing the lyrics, “You know I’ve been up for forty days and forty nights/and all my fears have multiplied/By the silence in your eyes,” Melo describes the song as “a celebration of that process—reconciling who and what you love with the people you love.”

The boy on the train home my sophomore year was not actually a boy, but a red-jacket wearing man. The tap on my shoulder was more of a jab into my side and because I felt his hands on me, I knew they weren’t the source. I didn’t lie about his smile, though. I still made him smile. Swaying with the creaky tracks, I shot my friend an anxious smile over the man’s shoulder. The smile seemed new, but was truly an old one I had frozen from earlier.

I mouthed “Oh my God.”

On my walk home I punched a tree. Then I felt dramatic.

We are not supposed to find lasting joy in what we see through rose-colored glasses. Those who report an affinity for such visions are deemed ‘gullible,’ for a world of pink is too good to be true. Everyone knows that. A good woman is a paradox.

Without tinted glasses, women are rarely looked at. If they were, we’d find that they are already entirely pink.

RKS show a variety of “coming out” experiences in their video, acknowledging that identity is re-revealed almost every day. The video pans out quickly from individual, fixed faces, each as solemn as the last. Disapproval, and even approval, are themselves evidence of becoming some ‘other,’ of being separate.

Sitting in my stepbrother’s church for his graduation, my unbaptized brother and I laughed uncomfortably. We had just returned to our seats from deflecting our blessing, having crossed our arms over our chests and being denied the

body of Christ. Our laughter was born of confusion, not disrespect. It was the nervous chuckle of absurd outcasts, rather than the hateful snicker of jealous runaways. With everyone sat, the pastor continued on about the power of family and trust. Of course, the message was not so direct. He talked about scraped knees, tears, and hugs. He talked about a child running home to their mother and father. He assured me, and all the other girls whose ears his voice reached, how incredible our wedding day would be, standing across from our soon-to-be husband. After, everyone discussed what a relatable sermon he preached.

I stopped listening because I was staring at the pink streaks on the church ceiling.

I never once broke eye contact with my friend as I was stuck between the woman in front of me and the penis belonging to the red jacket behind me. It was finally happening. I was desired. This was the course of events:

My friend smiled and I smiled. I was confused and I smiled. I was scared and I smiled. I was wanted and I smiled. I was hated and I smiled.

There wasn’t enough room to move or even speak, the only air left was reserved for breath. I chose to keep breathing.

I’ve been trained to be desired. I am to be the object of attraction. While a woman may be on a pedestal of honor or one of duty, she is nonetheless in the open, standing in line for the perfect shot.

The animosity towards women is so resilient, it not only overpowered my love, but left a residue of hate behind. I feared that showing desire was showing malice, emphasizing my own weakness as a woman. I was taught how to be a woman and shown how women were loved. Because I was taught the two were opposites, I was unable to balance who I was with who I desired. I rejected the color pink altogether.

I’ve searched for power in masculinity, but could never abandon my womanhood. I tried to reconcile my attraction to women with a desire for strength. I worked so hard to see something else, but I was always blinded by the pink.

Melo, too, understands that this raw, lawless, painful love is forever vulnerable: You better hide your love Hide your love Don’t let it slip away Don’t let it slip away

There are so many things I cannot change, but my desire will do no harm. I’ve stopped resenting the color pink.

It’s strong enough to protect itself.

The Main Character of Me

by Aayana Anand

I’ve always said that the best part of growing up South Asian was being immersed in the world of Bollywood: 3 hour long movies with cheesy plots, neverending soundtracks, intense choreography performed by minimally clothed women, and romantic montages consisting solely of neck-sniffing as opposed to kissing. I love the way that it’s implicitly taught me Hindi, the way I know every song lyric by memory, and the way it’s helped me appreciate my culture through film, even when I’ve struggled to come to terms with my identity.

As influential as Bollywood has been to my story so far, I’ve also experienced its dark side: toxic and unrealistic standards for women. Living in the world of Bollywood led to my over-admiration of iconic heroines like Deepika Padukone, Katrina Kaif, and Priyanka Chopra. Of course these women are talented as individuals, but I saw them mostly for the fact that they were light-skinned and skinny, orienting my definition of perfection around those factors. When I hit puberty and began to realize my physical imperfections, I used these factors as a rubric to evaluate myself negatively.

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I’d stand in front of my bathroom mirror, sucking my stomach in and testing out double chin removal hacks in an effort to mold myself into someone who looked remotely similar to the ideal image I’d created in my head. I grew insecure of my dark underarms, thinking that darker patches of skin on my body marked me as dirtier and uglier. I picked apart everything I hated about my body because of how it deviated from the bodies of the women I idolized. The worst part of it all was how young I was. Bollywood has been a part of my life since before I could remember, and consequently, so has this standard of perfection. As something that had been intertwined in my self-image for so long, its negative effects were pervasive and difficult to fight.

So, I stopped fighting.

For years, I spent my life living in the shadows of the “Sheila ki Jawanis” and the “Desi Girls.” I opted for clothing that covered my curves because I didn’t believe that my body had any value. I made Bollywood heroines, and the standards they upheld, main characters in my life; they were who I looked up to and who I wanted to be, a desire that stemmed from my jealousy and resentment about body image, dating, success, and influence. Because of this unproductive, deep-rooted longing, I gave into toxic relationships that reinforced my belief that I wasn’t worth as much as someone who was objectively “prettier” than me. I allowed this to feed into my perceptions of love and sexuality, blaming the fact that I’d never had a boyfriend on

1. Sony Music India VEVO, “Desi Girl”

2. T-Series, “Sheila Ki Jawani”

the fact that I didn’t look the part. I was trapped in a negative feedback loop: the more I gave into self-hatred, the more I minimized myself and sought comfort in toxic friends and Bollywood movies for emotional support, and the more both of those things fed into my self-hatred. I even let this spread to how I perceived myself academically. I labeled myself as the designated dumb friend and felt out of place accepting a congratulation or merely acknowledging my intelligence. I struggled to see myself as anything more than a follower of worthier people. While this cycle was definitely fueled by other supporting factors, it had originated from something that I, ironically, loved and found comfort in.

I never attempted to break out of this cycle until the summer of 2022. I had just finished a complicated first year of college, and after many personal and academic setbacks, I was looking for a change of pace and a shift in my mindset. I had secured an internship position, and I was hoping that it would give me the boost of confidence I needed to carry into the new academic year. I was on a remote consulting team, working in a group of five other students and one project mentor from around the world. It was quite overwhelming at first. With everyone coming from prestigious universities and having seemingly many more talents than me, I quickly felt insecure and overshadowed.

Things began to look up when I was assigned a specific team role: Research Lead. I began to settle into my responsibilities. I was new to the role and new to being an intern in general, so I took baby steps to make progress. I was shy in the beginning of the program, feeling bossy just for sending reminders to my teammates to complete certain tasks that were under my delegation. Soon, however,t with a push from my project mentor and a sprinkle of newly-acquired self confidence, I started to get better at asserting myself in meetings, emails, and other communications without feeling overbearing. I found great satisfaction in being a leader and a valued individual in a group. This change came into focus when I had my evaluation with my project mentor, who told me I possessed tremendous leadership potential, and that I was excelling in being a good example to my other teammates.

This comment shifted something in me. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I genuinely felt empowered by myself. Hearing my mentor, a skilled and experienced professional, tell me that I had it in me to lead and inspire a group of students was deeply gratifying. Surpassing every empty promise and affirmation I’d made to myself, this experience proved to me that I was capable of greatness. Even if it was on a small scale, I was able to see the results of this transformation week by week as my internship continued. I had a newfound sense of confidence that was beginning to

translate into tangible action, helping me realize my selfworth beyond what I physically looked like.

By the conclusion of the program, I was taking myself seriously for the first time. As ludicrous as it may sound, I’m not sure I ever truly gave myself value, personally or professionally, before this past summer. It wasn’t even the technical aspect of the program that shaped me, rather, it was the collaborative aspect that pushed me to explore my worth and competence on a professional level. More than ever, I began to see the leadership potential that existed within me, a gentle flame waiting to grow. It soon prompted me to revisit the conundrums I’d been facing my whole life about my selfworth. If I could be a leader on a project team, why couldn’t I become a leader in my broader life?

Entering sophomore year of college, I was ready to make a change for the sake of myself: I decided to say “fuck it.” For the first time in my life, the thought of handing the power in my life, physically or metaphorically, to anyone else (whether it be a Bollywood actress or a random girl I’d pass on the street) bewildered me. Now, I’ve begun to shamelessly steal the spotlight in my life and make myself the focal point. I’ve begun to see myself as my own main character—someone worthy of standing alongside the heroines I’ve watched all my life.

I allow myself to live a life of glitz and glamor, the kind I envision actresses living everyday. I treat myself like a queen, and I don’t settle for anything less than what I know I deserve. I treat my body like a temple, nourishing her and worshiping her as a vessel through which I make a unique mark on the world. I go on hot girl walks with a coffee in my hand and Taylor Swift playing in my ears. I add a pep in my step on sunny days or whenever I’m feeling a boost of energy. I wear frilly, floral dresses without worrying about my tummy, and I skip and twirl through the diag in them. I see life through rose-colored glasses, now that I hold my existence to a higher standard.

Bollywood heroines are beautiful, and whether or not I fit their implicitly defined standards of attraction, I am equally deserving of sharing the stage with them. As perfect as they were to younger me, I outgrew the ideals they reinforced. Gone are the days where Bollywood heroines sweep up the lead roles of my conscience. I still consume their content, but in a healthy, self-aware way. I love Bollywood, and I always will, but it will never captivate me in the same way that I captivate myself.

Besides, there is nothing more brave than taking the lead and being the main character in your own life.

Keep the conversation going!

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front Cover

ART CREDITS

Art by Olivia Noff and Camden Treiber

Art In a bathroom stall Art by Bella Lowe

8w7: The Nonconformist Art by Olivia Noff and Camden Treiber

Reading Gottfried Ben and Living Beast Days Art by Olivia Noff and Camden Treiber

On Lacking Maternal Desire Art by Lucy Bernstein

(There is no loose change but there are) Teeth in my Pocket Art by Ava Berkwits

The Love Doctor Needs Her License Revoked Art by Eva Ji

The Higher You Climb The Harder You Fall Art by Maevis Rosengart

Looking Back Down the Socioeconomic Ladder Art by Lila MacKinnon

Bisexuality is in the Eye of the Beholder Art by Sivan Ellman

Fall Retrospective Playlist Art by Catherine Hwang

Looking at Relationships from the Outside: A Single Perspective Art by Snowy Iverson

Just When I Needed Myself Most Art by Alaina McQuillan

I Can’t Be a Villain Art by Camden Treiber

The Unattainability of Being the Main Character Art by Charlotte Lee

“Como agua para chocolate” Art by Olivia Nolff

Writing Myself as the Main Character Art by Maria D’Ambrosio

Treat Us Kindly Art by Eleanor Durkee

Aisle 10 Art by Olivia Noff

outline art Art by Lila MacKinnon

Wanting Art by Stella Moore

My Body my choice Art by Maria D’Ambrosio

The Main Character of Me Art by Camden Treiber

BACK Cover Art by Olivia Noff

funny, fresh, fierce, feminist, fuck!