Voices

[CN: mention of intimate partner violence] Patsy Cline sang with such a beautiful range of emotion because she had experienced so many ups and downs in her own life.

This week in Aunt Ginger, we're talking about mental health.

I want to be seen, too. But now that I’ve settled into my fat body, now that I don’t waste my insomnia on worrying about my husband leaving me for a skinny blonde (as I’ve been warned), now that getting dressed isn’t an existential crisis, now that I shop online and just avoid the back of the store relegation, beauty has lost its magic.

The prevailing myth was that women had an unfair advantage in custody battles and that men were discriminated against.

And when you're multiply marginalized and know how much work there is to be done in the struggle for liberation, how few people are doing it, and that our lives literally depend on it, it can feel like you’re letting your people down.

[CN: racism, incarceration, slavery] What happens, they asked, when your community is targeted and generationally oppressed; when you are raised to fear the police because you’ve seen whose blood it is they’re spilling; when your father and uncle and siblings and cousins are all labeled criminals?

[CN: gender essentialism, birth] Patriarchs, love your orgasms all you like, but don’t fall for the weirdly puffed-up idea that they make babies. Penis power is solely limited to fertilizing eggs. And a fertilized egg is a fertilized egg — no less, no more.

That’s exactly the spirit that word should embody: someone who is loud, proud, and an advocate for themselves. Someone who stands out and is bold and beautiful for it. Someone who is unapologetically themselves.