No Niche Nelly
“I’ve never seen you so happy.” This statement was uttered by my then-boyfriend on a sixty-degree day in February my junior year of college. His sentiment was bold but not hyperbolic. We had gotten together in the fall, so he had yet to see his girlfriend intoxicated with vitamin D.
Some people cherish showers, seeing them as an opportunity to incubate with their thoughts, to escape external stressors, to get clean. I like being clean; I like having showered, but often the process is too tedious to enjoy the isolation and warmth.
I am a very tired person. In 2016, when I was a sophomore in college, my primary care physician told me I was iron deficient. A few months afterward, I wrote a song called “Iron,” of which the chorus was: Summer check-up during which I came to learn / That my body’s messed up because […]
I’m currently reading a book by David Brooks called The Road to Character. To me, reading has always felt like an exercise, akin to push-ups or—on the most challenging days—burpees. For those of you who don’t know (and you should feel lucky you don’t), the burpee combines the conditioning of your core, your legs, your […]
I. When I graduated college, I felt nothing. Okay, perhaps I felt a lot, but unpacking every fleeting rush of dread or even pride would require Ritalin and absolute silence. Yes, I am a writer, therefore I should welcome psychoanalysis, maybe even more so because I majored in psychology in addition to English. But, in […]
After learning about the Transcendentalists in the eleventh grade, I thought all writers were supposed to be decorated scholars, like Thoreau and Emerson, who went to Ivy League universities (or maybe they didn’t… I don’t actually know). I have followed a mildly impressive educational path: I attended Skidmore College, which is not an Ivy, but […]
When you have a crush on a small college campus, you develop a kink—in your neck. Your head swivels left and right, up and down (depending on the height of your crush). Eventually your body adapts and allows your head to rotate 360 degrees. This happens, of course, because an ugly part of you insists […]
My peers said studying abroad would “change my life”—that I just had to do it. This pissed me off. Who are they to say what I need to do with these crucial years of my youth? I need to pass my classes. I need to graduate. I need to find a therapist. My TJ Maxx […]
I used to be a teenage crybaby. Okay, I still cry a lot, like when an old person or dog is struggling in any minor way. In my freshman year of highschool, however, I cried about boys. In my English class, we read Romeo and Juliet, a play of star-crossed lovers, or at least that’s […]