writer • editor • dog lover
CN: this essay mentions coping strategies subsequent to adverse events in childhood (there are no details of the events themselves)
When I was eight, A Very Bad Thing happened.
Continue reading “The Very Bad Thing and the Chasm-Exoskeleton”
Happy new year! Which path are you taking for 2016?
So here we are, at the end of the first week of the new year, and I’m already talking about depression. Unfathomable, right? Or is it really? After all, we have just come out the other side of effectively two months of US holidays.
In January of 2012, my my mother’s younger sister, my small mother, my Cheriamma went kicking and flailing out of this world. The end of her life was as she had always lived it, full of fight, and on her own terms. Cheriamma was a brilliant, beautiful, eccentric woman who encountered academic failure for the first time at university. And with that first failure, she left her degree, enrolled in secretarial school, and set about finding work. If you don’t try, you can’t fail. A funny, generous, loving woman who never married, she was adored by her nieces and nephews. And her many many cats.
BLAM!
My bedroom door jangles, shaken to its hinges with the force of the slam.
“I hate you! You don’t understand anything!”
