"Today we have buzzwords to describe these experiences: Hyper-empathy. Executive dysfunction. Stims, fixations, and sensory overload. Back then, I didn’t know that there was more to autism..."
Read More
"We walked deeper into the cave, and our guide spoke with passion about the cave’s history, rarity, and magic. All the while, I could feel the weight of the rocks above my head and the unsettling distance between my body and its usual resting place on the Earth’s surface."
Read More
I came to China to work, but so much of me stayed in Croatia – my family, my partner, my friends, my professional and personal interests. My everyday life in Beijing is mediated between here and there, in the span of the seven-hour time difference, in the Beijing hutongs and the streets of Zagreb.
Read More
"There are no gender or weight classes. Everyone is equal.” This, more than anything I had ever heard about chivalry or courtly romance, sounds like a dream made real. In my armor, I’m not an awkward collection of ugly parts, unable to fit in anywhere. I am an armored combatant.
Read More
How could I even know what love means, really, when all of this was done to me in the name of love, or some shade of it?
Read More
Traveling never fails to remind me of where I come from and where my place is.
Read More
I remember the list of positions, one-two-three-four-five; the tension in my calves, the brittle arch of my arms as I balanced on the balls of my feet. Ageless, thoughtless reflexes inhabit my body, ghosts in a haunted house. You don’t outgrow what you learn that early on
Read More
When I think back on the most powerful times of my life, I find that solitude has usually played an important role in my power.
Read More
Even my own reflection is too much company this time, flashing up in fractal sections against the glass. Even the open fields, just visible beneath the moon’s outstretched fingers, are too much.
Read More
I want to paint a picture of someone who does not define themselves as aromantic or asexual. Just simply contented to be alone at this stage in life.
Read More
I go to the mirror, running my thumb along the sandpaper skin of my cheek, where the garden of little copper wires blossoms and blooms. I wish for a razor.
Read More
For the first time in my life, I felt I was part of the group in danger, part of the greater collective who faced this hatred. The danger, the hate seemed real and more palpable than ever before.
Read More
2017 was always reminding you where you were and that it was there, too, shaking its chains, snapping its teeth behind you.
Read More
Few people know the whole story of their lineage; for adopted people, answers about ethnicity can zigzag wildly. Occasionally, a casual acquaintance has asked me, “What are you?” as if they’ve observed my perma-tan with suspicion. My answers to that question have changed depending on what I thought I knew at the time.
Read More
There were a lot of things I didn’t tell my parents when I was growing up, and there were a lot of things they never told me in return.
Read More