Monday, April 29, 2013

Week 5 Reading Response

        I really enjoyed reading the New Yorker profile just before I go to do my interview because it is helping me to get into the right mindset of really pursuing my subject's story. I found the honesty and candidness of the author really reassuring, and it was amusing how she compared profiling someone to becoming intensely interested or even obsessed with them. I don't think I'm on this level yet with my interviewee, but I'm trying to get there before my interview: watching youtube videos of him, reading snippets of his books, and articles about him. Not only do I think this is important for me as a writer, and someone who is going to be genuinely interested in pursuing his story, but I think he will expect it of me as well. It will be understood that I know at least a bit about meat and his accomplishments from his career. As a person interested in his life, why wouldn't I?
        I found the Sinatra piece to be long and disorienting at time with so many characters coming into and leaving the scene. One thing that really struck me though that I want to try to channel in my own next piece is the endless forms of characterization the author uses to illustrate the essence, behaviors, tendencies, and life events of Frank. He does a fair amount of "telling" and describing, but these paragraphs and sentences take on a role of reliability and pace-setting within the piece while other strategies of characterization add dynamic details and subplots. The descriptions of Frank's women, friends, agents (Dexter was my favorite paragraph), fans, and employees and their relation to him all reveal little details about him as a subject of the piece. The description of him as "Il Padrone" held overarching characterization that was classified in this way through different sub-scenes. As scenes unfold, more character comes through showing his emotions, behavior, and dialogue. Later on we hear the story of his birth and childhood, indirect characterization about his development and family life. Even through his somewhat doppleganger Delgado we get additional descriptions and ideas about him. My favorite method of characterization was through the series of quotes of people who know and are related to him, giving us ideas about Sinatra himself, but also about his relationships and the impressions others have of him. All of these things working together made for an incredibly descriptive piece, not just in predictable ways but in creative ones, and gave me many ideas for my own piece.
       I had some apprehensions after reading Telling True Stories as well, as much of the advice and feedback from the passages were based off of longevity and development of relationship with a subject, which I feel is unrealistic for our assignment right now (at least with my subject). I found myself trying to reconcile our short time frame for the assignment. The advice I felt most helpful, though, included witnessing action or being able to look back on it with the subject, unearth it, and unpack it, allowing the ending to be the beginning in some way, and having guided conversations versus interviews. I do feel a sense of formality with my subject because he is very busy and well known, but I hope I am able to find a tone and create a setting of guided conversation. I think it would have been helpful to read these passages for 3rd or 4th week so we could have kept this information in mind when choosing an interview subject. How much of these circumstances should we expect to be realized in our short 10 week quarter, and how many should we just tuck away for our future narrative endeavors?

The Ticket to Me Final Draft with Outline


I never thought I would be driving down the highway and turn up the radio to listen to report updates about Proposition 8. I never thought I would be dodging conversations with my family, not quite knowing when or how to tell them what was going on.

“Charlotte, you know what would be perfect for you? If you had a boyfriend who was a cook”.
“Yeah……” I stalled, “Or I could just be a cook”.

There’s nothing scarier than learning something new about yourself:

She was in and out of a relationship with another girl. I thought she was kind of crazy… never showed up on time for stuff and usually smelled like alcohol. We would talk here and there, and one time we hung out for a while, and had a really long conversation about… everything… She told me about what it was like to come out to her parents. I told her I had never been in a relationship before. Right before we fell asleep she kissed me on the cheek, so I kissed her back. It was so much fun and felt so easy, so much easier than any time I had spent with anyone else lately. As we kept hanging out, I couldn’t get her off of my mind, and felt distracted by how strong and dominating our friendship was in my life.

She was just someone that I thought was really cool, who became a good, and then really good friend. We found reasons to hang out together, would make excuses to watch a movie or go on a walk. My heart beat faster when I was around her, and I would sweat a little, I would wonder what she was doing or who she was talking to, and get a little bit jealous… but I didn’t know what it was.

I wrote in my journal: Crush? But that felt weird. Girl crush?

One time we were palm reading in her room, and we looked at our sexuality lines. She had one that meant she liked girls, I didn’t. By palm-reading standards I was 100% straight.

Life went on and we spent time together, and time apart. I was always thinking about her and what she could be doing.
It felt like an unjustified obsession.
I tried taking up meditation.
It didn’t work.

Months went by… We got really close a few times, but I didn’t know what it meant to me, or how to recognize the feelings I had: butterflies when we held hands or spooned on her bed, the tingly energy and faint numbness that surged through me when we connected about something. They were strong feelings, but feelings that I had never felt before, and didn’t know how to label or accept.

The first time she kissed me she was really drunk. The next morning when I told her about it she said: “If only you were gay”. Huh. If only I was…

The second time she kissed me she was just a little tipsy, and came knocking on my door at 4am. I had already gone to sleep, but opened the door for some reason and then got back in bed. She came and laid down next to me, looked at me for a long time, and then slowly came towards me. We kissed once, twice, and then over and over, each one a trial, a question, an uncertainty. We kissed and talked and laid together. It happened again the next night, soberly.

Then it got hard. She was still with the other girl.
“We can’t keep doing this anymore”.
But it kept happening, and my feelings grew stronger, more certain.

And then I was in love with her. Maybe I was all along, but just didn’t know what it felt like. We said it to each other once. I felt the words coming out of my mouth but couldn’t back up the feelings because they felt so foreign to me. Even though I knew it was love, it was love with a woman.

The day she told me we really had to stop (she was really with someone else and as going to make it work), I got an urge to say what I was feeling:
“So… um, hmmm. So, I’m hesitant to say this because I just don’t know how I feel about it, but I think I only like women”.

Saying it out loud it all made sense:
Saying the word “boyfriend” in relation to my future self has never felt comfortable to me, like my motor skills know it will never be a part of my life. I always just laugh along when my friends obsess over boys and their attractiveness… not knowing how to participate. A couple of times I made up crushes on boys I had no feelings for, just because I felt like I should.

She was the best person to tell. She understood all of my feelings and uncertainty, and was practically taking the words out of my mouth.
I remember feeling so confused: “I almost don’t feel right saying it because I still feel like its not really true, or its not mine to say”.
She was right there, “Yup, yup, I know. You’re like, is this really happening to me? Because you never imagined that it would”.
But mostly, she was validating:
“You’re a part of the coolest group of people ever! We’re the most accepting, the most fun, and we’re the elite… we are better than everyone else”. She had a parade for me.

And then it was real.

A few days later I skyped my best friend:
“So, I’m gay… ahhhh kfjneneiunfw. That feels weird to say.”

 She, too, said all the right things. “Girl, it doesn’t have to be anything you don’t want. It reminds me of that Eminem song: I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like”.

It feels right. I was imagining my future and my story as something that deep down I knew was never going to happen. I was trying to get to Omaha, Nebraska without a map, but I’m totally ok to go to Chicago, just a two hour drive, using my GPS… and I know I will like it there. But a little part of me feels like I should go to Omaha even though I know it’s going to feel weird and uncomfortable and hard to navigate.

And the girl? We grew distant, but my feelings for her stayed the same, so I told her again one day.
“This wasn’t just a realization for me, it was more than that! I still really care about you”.
But it became very clear to me that this huge landmark in my life was just a little detour for her. I was left feeling dumb and ashamed not having my feelings reciprocated. I wanted to crawl in a hole. But I guess that is the way that a lot of people feel at some point in their life.

Every day is a new challenge: someone new to tell, something new to think about. How am I going to have children? Sometimes I’m excited to share this new part of me, sometimes I’m scared. My cousin’s girlfriend jokes that the only way she can meet my grandparents is if she has a paper bag over her head and pretends to be a man. When my sister tried to bring her girlfriend into the house to get a drink of water after she had driven her all the way home from Boston to New Jersey, my Dad left the property. He has since been trying to convince her that her relationship is “just a phase”. My mom is so concerned about my relationship deficit that she will be relieved to know it has just been a mass of confusion.

But I‘m not confused anymore. I feel great.



Intended Publication: Modern Love
Word Count: 1343

Outline:
Charlotte eludes herself
Charlotte likes girl
Charlotte explores feelings
Charlotte accepts feelings
Charlotte knows herself

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Writing for Story Response

It's so helpful to read this book while being in the middle of all of the processes Franklin talks about. There were so many tips and suggestions that I feel I've been hearing throughout my whole life, but that I can never be reminded of too many times: show don't tell, use action words and strong language, create a structure, foreshadow, include dialogue, identify and develop conflict, pace the story. Reading about each of these processes and aspects of telling a story after having just written our personal narratives was helpful in reflecting back on that process and feeling validated or encouraged about things I did well, or the same as he suggests in the book, and things I could have done differently.

One segment that was unfamiliar to me was the concept of an "outline" (and maybe this is why Marin wanted us to pay particular attention to it). I feel as though with my personal narrative I did things a little backwards: I definitely had a rough draft and then "polished" it as he suggests, and I think eventually my "woodwork" and conflicts emerged, but it took a while to get there. Instead I could have identified the conflicts and intermediate conflicts from the very beginning as he suggests. I also don't know how this will play out in this next piece though, because I'm pretty sure my subject doesn't have a whole lot of conflict... his life seems pretty great. But I could be wrong. That is a questions I would like to pose in class: because conflict seems to be so central to writing, what is another way we can navigate woodwork, pacing and developmental focus? I found it very helpful to project the stages of conflict and resolution on the the story "Mrs. Kelley's Monster" as that was a story that contained many little bits of action, all amounting to a dramatic pacing that kept the reader attentive to the story line.

I also love the segments where Franklin is describing what is going through a writer's head as he deliberates about a piece, confronts writers block, and "polishes" his work. Particularly in the chapter The Nature of Art and Artists, he is transparent about the writers thinking and process, and also acknowledges the writer as the primary agent of the story, even when receiving feedback. These are all a part of the writer's process peeling back the onion and confronting the characters. Though the part about telling a story of "reality" was rather dramatic, it shed light on the importance of, well, telling true stories, and the importance of maintaining that integrity to character development and reality. It's just a matter of finding the details of the story and of the character to extract, and then shaping them cleverly.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

The Ticket to Me


There’s nothing scarier than learning something new about yourself.
She was in and out of a relationship with another girl. I thought she was kind of crazy… never showed up on time for stuff and usually smelled like alcohol. We would talk here and there, and one time we hung out for a while, and had a really long conversation about… everything… Our thing was eye contact. We just kept looking at each other for a long time until one of us looked away. It was like a little game. She told me about what it was like to come out to her parents. I told her I had never been in a relationship before. Right before we fell asleep she kissed me on the cheek, so I kissed her back.

It was so much fun and felt so easy, so much easier than any time I had spent with anyone else lately. As we kept hanging out, I couldn’t get her off of my mind, and felt distracted by how strong and dominating our friendship was in my life.

She was just someone that I thought was really cool, who became a good, and then really good friend. We found reasons to hang out together, would make excuses to watch a movie or go on a walk. My heart beat faster when I was around her, and I would sweat a little, I would wonder what she was doing or who she was talking to, and get a little bit jealous… I didn’t know what it was.

I wrote in my journal: Crush? But that felt weird. Girl crush?

One time we were palm reading in her room, and we looked at our sexuality lines. She had one that meant she liked girls, I didn’t. By palm-reading standards I was 100% straight.

Life went on and we spent time together, and time apart. I was always thinking about her and what she could be doing.
It felt like an unjustified obsession.
I tried taking up meditation.
It didn’t work.

Months went by… We got really close a few times, but I didn’t know what it meant to me, or how to recognize the feelings I had: butterflies when we held hands or spooned on her bed, the tingly energy and faint numbness that surged through me when we connected about something. They were strong feelings, but feelings that I had never felt before, and didn’t know how to label or accept.

The first time she kissed me she was really drunk. The next morning when I told her about it she said: “If only you were gay”. Huh. If only I was…

The second time she kissed me she was just a little tipsy, and came knocking on my door at 4am. I had already gone to sleep, but opened the door for some reason and then got back in bed. She came and laid down next to me, looked at me for a long time, and then slowly came towards me. We kissed once, twice, and then over and over, each one a trial, a question, an uncertainty. We kissed and talked and laid together. It happened again the next night, soberly.

Then it got hard. She was still with the other girl.
“We can’t keep doing this anymore”.
But it kept happening, and my feelings grew stronger, more certain.

And then I was in love with her. Maybe I was all along, but just didn’t know what it felt like. We said it to each other once. I felt the words coming out of my mouth but couldn’t back up the feelings because they felt so foreign to me. Even though I knew it was love, it was love with a woman.

The day she told me we really had to stop (she was really with someone else and as going to make it work), I got an urge to say what I was feeling:
“So… um, hmmm. So, I’m hesitant to say this because I just don’t know how I feel about it, but I think I only like women”.

Saying it out loud it all made sense:
I’ve always felt uncomfortable saying the word “boyfriend” like my nerves or motor skills knew it would never be a part of my life. I always just laughed along when my friends obsessed over boys and their attractiveness… I’ve always thought girls were prettier. I’ve always avoided conversations about men or intimacy because it just wasn’t a part of my life. I filled my free time really fast and was always “too busy” for anything romantic to be happening. A couple of times I made up crushes on boys I had absolutely no feelings for, just because I felt like I should.

She was for sure the best person to tell. She understood all of my feelings and uncertainty, and was practically taking the words out of my mouth.
I remember feeling so confused. “I almost don’t feel right saying it because I still feel like its not really true, or its not mine to say”.
She was right there “Yup, yup, I know. You’re like, is this really happening to me? Because you never imagined that it would”.
But mostly, she was validating:
“You’re a part of the coolest group of people ever! We’re the most accepting, the most fun, and we’re the elite… we are better than everyone else”. She had a parade for me.

And then it was real.

A few days later I skyped my best friend:
“So, I’m gay… ahhhh kfjneneiunfw. That feels weird to say.”

 She, too, said all the right things. “Girl, it doesn’t have to be anything you don’t want. It reminds me of that Eminem song: I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like”.

It feels right. I was imagining my future and my story as something that deep down I knew was never going to happen. I was trying to get to Omaha, Nebraska without a map, but I’m totally ok to go to Chicago, using my GPS… and I know I will like it there. But a little part of me feels like I should go to Omaha even though I know it’s going to feel weird and uncomfortable and hard to navigate.

And the girl? We grew distant, but my feelings for her stayed the same, so I told her again one day.
“This wasn’t just a realization for me, it was more than that! I still really care about you”.
But it became very clear to me that this huge landmark in my life was just a little detour for her. I was left feeling dumb and ashamed that my feelings were so strong and not to have them reciprocated. I wanted to crawl in a hole. But I guess that is the way that a lot of people feel at some point in their life.

Every day is a new challenge: someone new to tell, something new to think about. How am I going to have children? Sometimes I’m excited to share this new part of me, sometimes I’m scared. My cousin’s girlfriend jokes that the only way she can meet my grandparents is if she has a paper bag over her head and pretends to be a man. When my sister tried to bring her girlfriend into the house to get a drink of water after she had driven her all the way home from Boston to New Jersey, my Dad left the property. He has since been trying to convince her that her relationship is “just a phase”. My mom is so concerned about my relationship deficit that she will be relieved to know it has just been a mass of confusion.

But I‘m not confused anymore. I feel great.

Intended Publication: Modern Love
Word Count: 1307

Story Pitch

Story pitch:

I remember the day I came home to find Kari Monley in our kitchen, home alone with the dogs, watching over them until our family cam back from vacation. I just just come back from a road trip visiting my friends and was going to fly down to Florida the next day to meet up with my family.

She seemed sweet, happy, had so much to say... I wondered if it was because she had been home alone for the past few days and didn't have anyone to talk to. I spent the night at home with her before I left the next morning, and we got to talking. This woman had lived one of the most insane life stories I had ever heard. And here she was in an oversized tshirt and sweatpants sitting in my kitchen, having been connected with us through one of my mom's friends because she was looking for short-term work. We started when she was a teenager: stories of her time working on a massive shipping boat with all men, nearly circumnavigating the state of Michigan. I think she tried going to school but realized the rigid academic structure wasn't quite for her. Traveled to Belgium, found work painting apartments, ran a half marathon there, and the day she was scheduled to leave, decided she wasn't ready. She stayed there, working and traveling and learned French from scratch. When she ran out of money she came home, fell in love with a pilot, got seriously injured and burned or something, started a career at Whole Foods where she met my Mom's friend Sally while finding her diherrea medication. Moved to Colorado, then to Ohio, making so many friends and having so many experiences. She was like a rockstar to me. Living in the moment, following her heart. I remember telling her about my life as an athlete, my plans to travel to Thailand and how full of awe and supportive she was.

But I also remember little glimpses of her emotional instability, starting one night when I was babysitting for Sally and she was running around the house trying to book a plane ticket to Colorado because Kari needed help. There were times when Sally had no idea where Kari was or what she was doing until she would call from a pay phone somewhere. Last I heard she was living in a halfway house in Cleveland and committed suicide.

Reading Response To LeBlanc and Orlean


             LeBlanc’s story has so much characterization: both of the author and how she deals with the cycles of Trina’s behavior, and of Trina. Even though there are not many physical descriptions of Trina, besides her physical behavior (crouching, darting, jumping) or her skinniness, I got a real sense of Trina’s tough tomboy nature. The characterization of Trina comes in many forms, as interpreted by the author, in Trina’s word for word account of herself, in the words of the observations made by her case workers, and through dialogue, providing for a strong sense of her presence in the author’s life as the main focus of the story. Additionally, the author does an excellent job keeping the reader captivated and hopeful for change for Trina, just like she is kept hopeful with every phone call she receives “There are many calls and they all share a shape, opening with the easy rhythm of friendship, and then collapsing awkwardly because I can’t carry the optimism for us anymore” (230). As these calls and attempts at rehab start to get old for the author in her life, they start to become cyclical for the reader as well, signaling and end to the story. I really enjoyed this pace of writing as it covers a large time frame. We get details and small sub stories at the beginning, and as the patterns of Trina’s life are narrated and become repetitive for the author, they spin to an end for the reader as well. This story also gave me a real sense of what it is like to write a narrative piece. This is a story not just of the main character but also of the author and character’s relationship over time: the context for the story. Writing narrative is not just about telling someone else’s story, it’s about telling their experience as the author has been a part of it. I hadn’t understood this distinction before.
            The characterization in Orlean’s piece starts out much more literal, but also sets the scene very well for the piece. It is much more directly descriptive and, but is nicely congruent with the age and character of the protagonist. She also stages the story with an intervention, talking about studies of teenage boys that I thought would ultimately lend themselves to Colin’s story, and was surprised when they did not become a prominent part of the story. I wasn’t ever quite sure what the story was about exactly, and never really understood what caused the writer to write this piece. Was it the affection she has for this young boy? I was also left wondering who the writer is exactly, and how she came to meet Colin or decide to write about him. Her relationship with him was confusing to me, as she seemed to function as a babysitter or caretaker at times picking him up from school, but never explicitly had that role. I didn’t enjoy or understand this story as much.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Writing Process Narrative Piece:


Writing Process Narrative Piece:
I started out writing about my two sets of Grandparents, all named Joan and Ed. Which was fun to piece together, but didn’t have the revelation aspect. What I’m still struggling with here is that this story/experience/mindflow and personal transition is something so intensely emotional that I’m still working through in my own head I have no idea what it feels like to hear it as someone else. My biggest fear is that it is confusing, cliché and uninteresting. It’s interesting to me because they are new thoughts and feelings for me, but I don’t know if I am conveying them in a way that is interesting to my readers. Mostly I wrote about this because it was what fit this prompt in my life right now. Not because I was very confident I could tell a good story through these events. How can I make it do both?
I struggled mainly with the prompt… I had many narrative experiences I wanted to write about, but none with a core revelation. Because this experience was relatively recent in my life, when deciding what to write about I kept going back to it, and going back to it, thinking about how perfectly it fit the prompt because it did cause me to think entirely differently about myself. But I never imagined myself as someone who would write a piece like this. It felt (still feels) kind of like a cliché, first love sort of piece, and for some reason now that makes me feel stupid for writing about it. I guess I’m just wondering how it sounds… cliché? It’s my own, so its hard for me to see that, but if that’s the case that’s one of the biggest things I want to revise.
It’s something that’s on my mind quite a bit, and so writing about it was really good for me. I used a lot of journal entries, excerpts that I remembered feeling sooo good writing about because they were such genuine thoughts and feelings, written while I was caught up in it all. The more I wrote the more I found little, telling details that helped me to show the story rather than just tell it. So, of course, more time for this piece will be good.

How I Found Me



How I Found Me


Intended Publication: Modern Love


She was openly gay, and was in and out of a relationships with another girl. We would talk here and there, and one time we hung out for a while, and had a really long conversation about… everything…  it was so much fun and felt so easy, so much easier than any other bonding experience I had had with anyone lately. As we kept hanging out, I couldn’t get her off of my mind, and felt distracted by how strong and dominating our friendship was in my life.

She was just someone that I thought was really cool, who became a good, and then really good friend. We found reasons to hang out together, would make excuses to watch a movie or go on a walk. My heart beat faster when I was around her, and I would sweat a little, I would wonder what she was doing or who she was talking to, and get a little bit jealous… I didn’t know what it was.

I wrote in my journal: Crush? But that felt weird. Girl crush?

One time we were palm reading in her room, and we looked at our sexuality lines. She had one that meant she liked girls, I didn’t. By palm-reading standards I was 100% straight.

Life went on and we spent time together, and time apart, and I thought about her so much. The background in my brain was like an Imax movie of things that I missed about her or reminded me of her.
It felt like an unjustified obsession.
I tried taking up meditation.
It didn’t work.

These feelings continued for months, developing a strong protectiveness for her, always wondering where she was and jealous of whoever she was hanging out with. We got really close a few times, but I didn’t know what it meant to me, or how to admit to the feelings I had: butterflies when we held hands or spooned on her bed, the tingly surging energy and faint numbness that surged through me when we connected about something. They were strong feelings, but feelings that I had never felt before, and didn’t know how to label or accept.

The first time she kissed me she was really drunk. The next morning when I told her about it she said: “If only you were gay”. Huh. If only I was…

The second time she kissed me she was just a little tipsy, and came knocking on my door at 4am. I had already gone to sleep, but opened the door for some reason and then got back in bed. She came and laid down next to me, looked at me for a long time, and then slowly came towards me. We kissed once, twice, and then over and over, each one a trial, a question, an uncertainty. We kissed and talked and laid together. It happened again the next night, soberly.

Then it got hard. She was with someone else, and it was awkward.
“We can’t keep doing this anymore”.
But it kept happening, and my feelings grew stronger, more certain.

And then I was in love with her. Maybe I was all along, but just didn’t know what it felt like. We said it to each other once. I felt the words coming out of my mouth but couldn’t back up the feelings because they felt so foreign to me. Even though I knew it was love, it was love with a woman.

Feeling and understanding these things enabled me to identify with other human beings. Love is human nature, and it can occupy your life. The feelings of sickness and depression that come with the thought of not being able to be with someone… the way I feel when I look at her… the way I feel when she’s with someone else: everything, the jealousy, the passion, the devotion, the obsession, all the extremes, all of those feelings that people sing about, and write about, I can hear them now. I can feel them now.

It was one thing to admit it to myself, and another thing to tell my other people:
“So, I’m gay… ahhhh adnjnqjndibqpd. That feels weird to say.”

 She said all the right things. “Girl, it doesn’t have to be anything you don’t want. It reminds me of that Eminem song: I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like”.

Saying it out loud felt foreign, against the rules. It was something I wanted to say, and should say, but also something I immediately wanted to take back. Because it was a part of me I didn’t know about myself, so it didn’t feel like it was mine to say or tell. But once I adjusted to it, I just felt like me, and like I could embody, explore and inhabit every cavern of myself.

Knowing this thing about myself, whatever it is, feels so good. I remember my first day: out of the closet, out in the world! When I woke up I had this new sense of conviction and confidence in myself, capacity to own my life. I wasn’t worried about my outfit or the way I looked because I was just me. And now I had a me. Owning, having, recognizing this little thing about myself has erased all of my day to day worries and fears. There is nothing more weird than learning and having to adjust to something new about yourself.

Even though I had no idea what it was or how to find it, this new way of being was the ticket to being me. Knowing this about myself makes everything else more real. I felt lost, and now I feel found. I was imagining my future and my story as something that deep down I knew was never going to happen. I was trying to get to Omaha, Nebraska without a map, but I’m totally ok to go to Chicago, using my GPS… and I know I will like it there. But a little part of me feels like I should go to Omaha even though I know its going to feel weird and uncomfortable and hard to navigate.

At first I wanted to take it back, bury it away deep inside of me, or somehow change myself to make it not true. But later I wanted to shout it off of a rooftop, do a star jump, a toe touch, call everyone I knew!

This thing, this new feeling, has connected me to an entirely new population of people… people who have gone through this exact same thing. Even though what I’m feeling feels scary, knowing that other people have felt it too makes it ok. It’s a community of people that is so bonded by something incredibly emotional, deep ad scary process that we all share. I understand the bond, the pride and the celebration of being able to share and own who we are.

How am I going to have babies? There are so many things about the future that scare me now. So many challenges that I never thought I would have to face.

Finding love for me was not so much about finding someone else as it was about finding myself.

Love is all you need love is all you need love is all you need. But, for real it’s all you need.