So he’s the mother figure in the movie Carrie, essentially. This information came at an apropos time because I have been working quietly on a book of non-fiction essays one might loosely refer to as a memoir. During this long and arduous memoir writing process, I am having all kinds of revelations I might not have had if I hadn’t  decided to try to attempt to write the book. For example: I’m going over varying situations I have been in with friends, situations I never would have even thought about, and realizing that I am a complete control freak. I had no idea whatsoever. Also, I’m incredibly self-concerned, self-centered and selfish. I’m in my twenties, I’m a writer. Also, some people might refer to me as a bully. I hit my friend Walter more than I realized, for example.

Writing a memoir has its own host of obvious problems such as: Will I get sued? Assassinated? How does one write a memoir without incriminating herself, exactly? How does one write a memoir without telling everyone else’s secrets and business, but still somehow discovering her own? This mouth is like an iron vault, don’t worry, whatever you’ve said to me is safe. The memoir is mostly about my illness. Also about losing a parent at eighteen, and probably a bunch of other things you might say, “What are the odds of that?” at. The odds, they aren’t generally with me. I am learning as I go here, that the memoir is actually about self-discovery and the writing process we go through while working on it. Or, working it out.

One of my favorite examples of a man caught permanently in his own perspective was Joe Gould, also known as Professor Seagull. Mr. Gould’s life would eventually be chronicled by Up In The Old Hotel author Joseph Mitchell in a work titled, “Joe Gould’s Secret” and in a 1942 profile at the New Yorker. Gould/Seagull was a poet and author in Greenwich Village, known for his drinking, his outlandish sidewalk stumbling, his ability to gain funding from wealthy unnamed benefactors, his attempt to pen “the longest book in history” which clocks in at approximately 9 million words, titled An Oral History of Our Time (A.O.H.O.O.T.), and my personal favorite: The project in which Professor Seagull believed he had learned the language of seagull and that he should translate all of Longfellow’s poetry into the seagull language accordingly.

Though he was what one might refer to as a “homeless bum,” it is rarely mentioned that Joe Gould Professor Seagull also held a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard and that much of the ethos behind Columbia University’s now thriving Oral History Department stems from Gould’s original Oral History concepts. “Civilization brings distinctions of caste apart from individual attainment,” Gould wrote in “A.O.H.O.O.T,” and, “Insanity is a topic of peculiar interest to me. Despite my theory that people with strong will-power and a sense of humor never go off their nuts, I almost have first hand information about it.”

I am unsure whether one can speak seagull, though I did once visit an independent press publisher who later told me he was incredibly into imagining women having sex with actual horses. I really attract the good guys.

The point is the things we challenge ourselves with and how we can learn through them.

Recently, I was home in Boston visiting some friends and waiting for an MRI appointment. Most of the roommates in my friends’ apartment have MFA degrees and collect unemployment, so four people were sitting in a living room drinking coffee and watching Netflix movies after sleeping in well past nine. Thumbing through the options, we came across a one hour special on a book called The Voynich Manuscript.

The Voynich Manuscript is a book dating somewhere around 1404 and currently held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the campus of Yale University. Often now referred to officially as “Beinecke MS 408,” the book had no name upon original re-discovery and is named after Lithuanian book collector Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912 on an antiquities purchasing excursion, when he found the 240-page book (it is missing 32 pages and is technically 272 pages) at the bottom of a trunk of books in a monastery.

The book is argued about by everyone, but this is what we know: It’s a late medieval document explaining through paintings the generally accepted rules and details of farming at the time (and you have to remember that the 15th century was a veritable literal ice age), details of the time’s alchemy, and astrology. The paintings are beautiful, and herein is not the enigma hundreds of scholars have dedicated their lives to over hundreds of years, but in the font type that lines the pages. No one, nobody, not MIT computer programs, not the world’s finest linguists, not actual British and American intelligence codebreakers, has ever been able to decipher even one word of the hundreds of pages of symbols most believe stand for a version of letters in a language. Nobody. The thing’s six-hundred years old. According to scholar Elizebeth Friedman, such attempts are “doomed to utter frustration.”

There have been dozens of theories. Some believed Voynich fabricated the work, but this has been proven untrue. Some linked the book to a medieval conman whom I absolutely adore named Edward Kelley. He was a conman who actually had his ear cut off as punishment for being a liar, would later live in Bohemia for years and then acquire some wealth after convincing various royals that he could turn varying substances into gold through alchemy–which he couldn’t do, he just snuck gold chips into the lab in his coat. He also was able to convince an entire town that he was a medium who was able to communicate with the dead. This particular bag ended quickly when he explained to his employer that a ghost had informed him that they should swap wives for an evening. Kelley was eventually proven not be the author. There was his friend, John Dee, a mathematician in the court of Queen Elizabeth I…Dee was not the author. Some people think the Voynich Manuscript was written by King Rudolph II’s personal physician, which I may disagree with, though I actually think the theory conceptually is closer to the truth because the book is an almanac without any words, essentially, and it would seem that the point was to catalogue the science of the time.

I will tell you my theory first, then talk about what this has to do with a memoir.

Originally, I felt the manuscript was made by a brilliant crazy guy who had come up with his own language. This was a theory accepted by many, which was a part of why hundreds of thousands of hours and dollars have gone into deciphering its words’ meanings. People also felt it may have been the last book of a language in an era and area of civilization with which we were not previously familiar. I bought both of these for two minutes, then I changed my mind. In publishing, we have what is called “dummy text,” essentially just jargon symbols put onto a layout draft of a book. Generally the actual text is later put in, after the tables and labels have been edited under the diagrams. What I think happened is that an artist was either commissioned to paint this book to catalog the science of the day, or that he chose to catalog the science of the day, and that he couldn’t read. Essentially, he put in his own dummy text. This is why nobody can decipher what the symbols which look like they would go where letters go mean, because they are just symbols without meaning invented by an artist to look like letters. He scribbled elegantly after taking down the paintings which served as a veritable photograph explanation of the farming, alchemy and astrology of the time.

What struck me as poignant in the Netflix-endorsed documentary, (dear people reading this 350 years from now, Netflix totally was the end of the Blockbuster chain), were the interview segments with the scholars who had dedicated their lives to trying to understand what the letters mean. One man said, “It is a hall of mirrors which reflects what each person who looks into it wants to see.” This had me thinking about the way we lie to ourselves, and about writing the memoir. Also I felt so bad for that guy.

One of man’s larger downfalls is a lack of information, or a vagueness in information. When things are left un-communicated, unsaid, it leaves room for interpretation, and interpretation is a motherfucker. Let’s take the case of Professor Seagull, who interpreted Longfellow into the sqwuaking sounds of a semi-migratory bird. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I think in every situation, we find what we are looking for, sometimes what we want to hear. Hindsight is 20/20, as it were.

If I, in all honesty, am to write a memoir in which I discover anything at all, in which the letters are not just made up dummy text I am sifting through, I probably can’t always paint myself as the good guy. This is a major problem for me: I like winning. I like to win. I think of myself as a winner in my head, which is a ridiculous perspective. Just yesterday a friend was trying to get me to dedicate time to watching yet another television program, this one from the first-person pseudo-memoir perspective, called My Life As Liz, which he explained as, “She goes to art school in Brooklyn and doesn’t have any friends. You would totally relate to her.”

If I look at the time I dated my ex through the now biblically, epically tainted perspective I’ve been told about, or the rest of my life as a whole, so much comes to light. For example, the fact that I didn’t have any clue what I was doing, whatsoever.

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Critic John Bush once wrote that Billie Holiday “changed the art of American pop vocals forever.” I sat on the back legs of my chair imagining her singing into a microphone while her voice traveled up past the wooden tables and probably echoed out up the stairs and onto the sidewalk some warm August on a Tuesday. Probably the room was smoky, probably I wouldn’t have been able to wear blue jeans inside at the time.

One of my favorite blues singers was Ms. Bessie Smith. Often described as a “Rough, crude, violent woman,” she was also one of the most famous American voices during the roaring 1920s through prohibition and through the inescapable racism that blanketed and blinded the States like blizzarding snow. Rumors surrounding her death are still debated, the people who were there with her said she was taken to a hospital bleeding to death after an automobile accident and denied treatment. Here is a clip of her singing in 1929. Technology rules.

Ella Fitzgerald won an amateur singing contest at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem in 1934. She would build a life and career out of this voice that echoed pain, triumph, more pain. Later dubbed the “First Lady of Jazz,” she received the Kennedy Center Honors award by the White House for lifetime achievement in the performing arts in 1979. Jazz music and the world would be entirely changed by her voice, which sang through Jim Crow, the Depression, World War II, Woodstock and Watergate.

When Aretha Franklin (dubbed the “Queen of Soul”) sang “Respect” in 1967 it was important. Context:

-”Until 1967 and the enactment of the marital-property section of the Family Code, Texas law put a wife’s salary, bonuses, and wages under her husband’s control to the extent that technically only he could ‘contract her services to another.’ In other words, an employer who wished to comply strictly could not hire a woman without consulting her husband.”

-In 1967 Gloria Steinem was around but not entirely everywhere.

-The “Mississippi Burning” Trial was underway. (Three unarmed Civil Rights Workers had been shot by Mississippi officials. The shooting would lead to eighteen KKK members going on trial, only seven of whom would be convicted. The Times would later call the verdict, “A measure of the quiet revolution that is taking place in southern attitudes.”) Right.

Then, somewhere along the lines the underground started popping on sidewalks in the Bronx, roller skates came back into fashion and America had disco. Diana Ross went from a manicured Supreme ever in the shadows of a man-produced entertainment world to a solo Diva in Gucci. Then we had Debbie Harry rapping. She looked around at what was going on in the city and she said, “Oh I can do that,” and a white punk woman with a huge mouth said, “Oh, hello.” That was a Diva revolution. Somewhere around here the sexuality Gloria Stenheim had been hustling toward came farther to the forefront and some of my favorite living art movement humans on the planet, Drag Queens began to show themselves in greater daylight.

Drag Queen Rupaul defines a Diva as a “Female version of a hustler.” Americans need Divas. Divas remind us of what we’d like to be, which is someone who puts her chin up, honey. A Diva lays it all out on the line, and in doing so gives us the strength to as my Drag Queen Yogi Guru on St. Mark’s named Chad says, “Just fucking deal with whatever you’re dealing with.”

Tina Turner wasn’t no street hustler, but she is the Mother Theresa of music. When you are sad, broke down, alone, needing to “deal with it,” look to Tina Turner. If I can make one millimeter of the pain I have been through in my life as sharable and relate-able as Tina Turner made her entire life, then I will still not be a Tina Turner. A Diva commiserates on what it is to be human. She says, “Oh you know the blues too?”

One of my favorite literary renderings of a Diva is John Berendt’s character “The Lady Chablis,” who was a Drag Queen performer in his book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Her signature motto was, “Two tears in a bucket, fuck it.” The Lady Chablis feels your pain, and the Diva expresses it with you. (John Berendt was a columnist at Esquire for twenty years and is a retired New York Magazine editor, honey.)

Everyone needs sparkle, it is in our bones, it is part of the human condition, and so, the Gods gave us Madonna. Madonna’s “Vogue” itself was a veritable walk down Generation Gaps. Lyrically she channeled old Hollywood and our entire generation suddenly knew the name Greta Garbo. Divas are self-made self-believers, Madonna’s from Jersey.

Here is a condensed list of Divas over the generations: Stevie Nicks. Nina Simone. CHER. Bette Midler actually believe it or not had a ton to do with the gay community coming into the American pop limelight back in her day. Gwen Stefani (Fringe Diva): I saw her concert on Oahu when I was in the middle of getting dumped in Hawaii. Changed my goddamn life. I am so serious about this. Scoff if you must. You go, Gwen Stefani, that drum and bass remix was tight yo. The point here is Divas swoop in and give us comfort.

Let’s not overlook the stars the intellectual think-tank known as the Disney Corporation has shared with our generation: “It’s Britney, Bitch,” was an un-Diva first line to a song. Britney Spears is an example of what happens when soldiers don’t decompress correctly after years in Afghanistan. She had been in Disney boot camp for so much of her lifespan that when she reached her twenties she lost it because she didn’t know how to function on her own. She had been told when to rehearse, when to eat, when to sleep, what to wear, where to stand, and when she went out into the world she made it four years before a complete meltdown, proving that no one is actually an island. (Same goes for you, Lindsey Lohan. Which kills me because Tina Fey’s Mean Girls script was genius.) However, there is of course something in the Diva world known as the comeback. What fresh hell you have wracked on your life means not as much as what this very moment means right now. Divas are Divas because they get back up.

There were some hot mess Divas. Whitney Houston. In her day she was unbelievable, she could do no wrong, she was everywhere, but then she reminded us that crack is indeed whack, and it was heartbreaking. Save Whitney. Addict or not, being a Diva takes work. It is not easy to wear a ten pound sequin dress while confessing that you too have felt heartbreak under stage lights to a smoky audience of strangers, honey. A Diva pulls it together. Worse, Mariah Carey still has singing pipes like woah but she married some B-list star who is twenty years her junior so now she doesn’t look like a Diva, she looks like some kind of creepy weirdo.

Beyonce is a Diva on a myriad of levels. That woman wears the most uncomfortable stillettos while dancing like the world is ending and never, ever, do we even for a moment see a flicker of discomfort from her. She’s poised, elegant, cheerful and writes straight-up feminist bangers such as “Irreplaceable,” (the “You Must Not Know ‘Bout Me” song) and don’t even act like you haven’t sung along to that while in line at the food co-op because you know that is straight Diva commiseration right there. Let it out, honey.

Alicia Keys. A singer from Harlem who makes playing the piano cool on a pop level. A nation owes Alicia Keys a debt of gratitude for that piano. You can donate funds to music programs here.

Sadly, I would be remiss if I didn’t draw the Generation Gap tributary to one Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta because she is the sad state our Divas are in currently. She refers to herself as Lady Gaga. She is currently on the cover of Vanity Fair, a magazine which used to run covers of icons such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Ms. Elizabeth Taylor. When Lady Gaga showed up I thought, “Who the hell is this clown?” I was willing to minimally go with the Lady Gaga because I thought sincerely that if there was to be a new American pop icon all over billboards, at least she was doing it with some art sensibility? The more I thought about it, though, the more it seemed like she actually was the only one who was calling her costumes art. Everyone else was calling them Alexander McQueen ripoffs. Had she just worn some original Alexander McQueen outfits, then she’d actually be wearing some art. A Diva does not copy. This is not even my major complaint about Stefani Joanna Angelina Germanotta. What I really am upset about is that “Alejandro” song. Here is the chorus:

Don’t call my name, don’t call my name, Alejandro.
Don’t call my name, Roberto.

Before we continue can I just say Alejandro, Roberto, listen, this is my email, nicolleelizabee@gmail.com, and you can call my name all day.

So this Alejandro song comes on the pop airwaves and critics compare it to Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita,” give it five stars and thousands of people are driving in their cars singing the words, “Don’t call my name, Alejandro,” out loud.

Lady Gaga then comes out with a statement that “Alejandro” is about gay men being unaccepted from the Catholic Church and this song is to her Hispanic Gay fans from the Church’s perspective. Now, let’s say this is true (which I don’t think it is, what I think happened is that she stated this after the fact, but that’s just one Diva enthusiast’s opinion). For argument’s sake, let’s go with it and say her press release is true, then, even still the supposed lyrics explaining the supposed song point are too vague for the issue she claims on the table to come across even in a hint. Let’s take the lyric, “I’m not your babe, Fernando.” If we are to break this down linguistically, what Gaga is saying she’s implying is that the Catholic Church is saying to Fernando that the Church is not his babe. Now, if we are to linguistically usurp that “babe” in this Lady Gaga context refers to the church as a positive entity and then that she is implying in some sort of un-pronounced backstory that Fernando has looked to the church for some kind of help and it has responded with “I’m not your babe,” wouldn’t this line still be negative toward Fernando because in its perhaps in its informality Gaga is then implying that Fernando thinks of the church as his “babe” and while we can take the term to be a slang one of endearment, what Gaga is then saying is that Fernando equally has no respect for the church as the church has for him. And that just isn’t true. Gay people believe in God sometimes, too, Gaga. Gay people have respect for the Church too, sometimes. That is the entire point of your song supposedly, you said, isn’t it? That Fernando went to the Church for help and the Church shuns him? So you, like, undermined your own point. If that’s what you meant which again I so doubt, and thus, what she may or may not have been trying to communicate in all its potentially liberal greatness doesn’t come through. However, what she did in reality was to get thousands of people singing the words, “Don’t call my name, don’t call my name, Alejandro. Don’t call my name, Roberto.” That is just the fact, and even if there is supposed deeper meaning to Lady Gaga behind those words, that’s not what people in the real world hear; all people hear is some kind of negativity directed at Alejandro. So she tried to express something, and she failed at it. Divas are allowed to fail but this is just whack. That’s right Lady Gaga, you’re bunk.

A Diva, honey, reflects reality because she is pain, and she never lets go of it. You know who is probably singing the blues for your repenting as we speak? Mary J. Blige. That’s a Diva who always feels, and this is how you can tell the difference in Generational pop stars. Choose your icons wisely, some will tell you they love you love you back back, but only a few won’t actually mess with you. Real Divas are our Cinderella, our tragic heroines. Divas rep her own private history publicly and in doing so, remind us of ours and the past, and I’m hoping, as are they, pointing toward some road to something better. You’re not alone. You’ll be fine. Look at Betty White for godsakes. The Diva is the American narrator.

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I like to tell myself to chin up and walk proud, though I’ve seen a million doctors and they all say the same thing: When my Paternal Grandmother was pregnant with my Father, she was given a Thalidomide to aid in the pregnancy, which was her first, in a post-Depression New England America, where the medicinal think-tanks were thriving, where experiments with surety were conducted. What the Doctors didn’t know was this dose of hormone would cause severe birth defects in the following generation, and I am that generation.

I was eight years old. I was walking down the stairs to play in the yard, and I remember holding onto the doorknob to get outside, and squeezing it with everything I had, in tremendous pain in my lower abdomen. The pain passed and I went outside and I would wait seven years to tell anyone about it, because we have bodies, and sometimes they hurt, and so we move on, that is where the pain I can remember started. When I was fifteen, I began to have pain so severe, my family had to rush me to and from the hospital averaging maybe every-other month. Face pale white, could-not-talk kind of pain. I-don’t-know-what-is-happening kind of pain. The wards of children’s hospitals are terrifying, and they get worse when you don’t know what’s wrong and a college freshman Candy Striper comes into your cloth-walled cell to tell you she can teach you to play cards.

Before we go any further, I would like to tell you about Uwe Boll. Uwe Boll is a retired boxer turned Independent German film director with a PhD in Literature who is considered by some, comparable to Ed Wood, and one of the worst film makers in history. Uwe Boll has directed over twenty-one films since 1991, and written two books on the subject. Apparently in Germany, there used to be some kind of private tax kick-back for film investors funding projects within the county, making Uwe Boll’s films non-profits. The majority of his catalogue is film adaptation of video games, a film version of House of the Dead is one of his more recent, for example. I don’t bring him up because I care whether you’re into his movies or not, I bring him up because I want to tell you about the time he invited his critics to physically fight him for twelve rounds in a boxing ring. Film critic Chris Alexander, one of the people challenged to the duel, said the situation was “The weirdest pop culture bizarre journalism stunt I’ve ever been involved in.”

I bring up Uwe Boll because if I could fight being sick in a ring I would, but I can’t. Being “a sick kid” is sort of like a constant boxing match with the world. Uwe Boll recently referred to two of his critics, directors Michael Bay and Eli Roth, as “fucking retards,” for example. Misguided or not, awful at what he does or not, Uwe Boll still has more heart and tries harder than most. (Five critics did accept his invitation to fight in a boxing match, and he did proceed to kick each of their asses one after the other, by the way. Widely documented.) Don’t get me wrong, life is hard in general. Doing anything is hard. We all have our private wars and crosses to bear.

So one night, I’m overnight in the children’s ward of Umass Memorial in Worcester, Massachusetts–home to Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”–and an infant is in a plastic incubator next to me. He is coughing with the croup, and when I wake up from a morphine-induced sleep, he is gone. When I ask the Nurse where he went she tells me he didn’t make it through the night. I can’t fight that.

Meanwhile, people like Padma Lakshmi, first famous for her relationship with Salman Rushdie, then for her time on the television show Top Chef, are suffering from the same illness I was (in part) about to be diagnosed with. She took the Uwe Boll in her and she received a Genius Grant and founded a research wing at MIT to look into our problem. My tiny family unit in our own way kept trying. I was lucky, and we found a Doctor who thought he could help. In Boston at Children’s Hospital, a Doctor who had been on CNN said to us, “You have Endometriosis I think, and you will be okay.”

The sort of empowerment that comes with having a small lifetime of illness and then coming into information about it is something I can liken only to finding a soul-mate. To finding a reason. Two weeks after my High School Graduation, I was assigned my first Laproscopic procedure, a day surgery routine. Your belly button gets opened and a camera goes into it and some people look around to pinpoint the problem. There was a short story in a Ploughshares I cannot find in their archive told from the perspective of a woman with Endometriosis. Endometriosis as discussed in the story, is when a woman doesn’t fully shed her menses, it stays put, it travels to other organs, it sticks, it causes internal inflammation and tissue scarring, it’s gross and it hurts, and it’s common. 55% of American women have Endometriosis in one of the four stages my Doctor has defined for the AMA, and most don’t know it. So you think: will this period blood that stays inside me travel to my lungs? My heart?

That’s not the issue. The issue is what I look like on the inside. One of my fallopian tubes developed in utero with a knot in it, my uterus herself a teenie underdeveloped runt of a gal, lopsided and hanging to one side, the size of a small child’s.

When I went back to the Doctor’s office in the Tower, to hear my diagnosis, after recovering from the surgery, I didn’t think I was at 17 years old, getting a decision which would change my life, I thought I was getting another answer. At the time this was what I was told: I could get pregnant, I would do this by having my uterus stretched to make room, and there would be one baby. There would be one baby birthed into this world from my mortal coil via Cesarian-Section at six or eight months, the baby would live, and there would be no other. I walked out of that office understanding that things are asked of people because they can handle them, and that I at 17 years old, was one of the 19 diagnosed women on the North American continent at the time with what is called a Unicornature Uterus: I am the unicorn.

I spent the summer working as a waitress. I went to community college to begin my education. I got a two bedroom apartment with my high school sweetheart and four other male friends, I put it all out of my mind. I didn’t talk about it, I didn’t think about it. We had been together for five years when we started to grow apart. We had been through the end of high school, most of college together, and we weren’t winning anymore. Our house was crumbling and so we called it quits and I was faced with facts: There would someday be other lovers, and they would see my scars, and what would I tell them? My downfall into a pit of misunderstanding everybody else began. When my friends would complain about their period cramps, I would try not to scoff. I would try not to think, “You ever wake up really thirsty? How about not pregnant?” R. Kelly came out with a song this year called, “Pregnant” and the chorus is, “Knock you up. Knock you up.” And it sucks.

Then there was Jennifer. My friend Jennifer was smaller than me, more neurotic and nervous than me, more upset than me, and she had a story. She was born prematurely, she was a Cesarian-Section child, she had spent the first three months of her life in a tiny plastic incubator room while her mother pressed her hand to the window and pleaded. I thought about what it must be like to not hold your child. I thought about what it must be like to be in there and look up. I realized that I didn’t want to tell anybody this. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about this. Not lovers, not boyfriends, not friends, and I didn’t. I think the worst thing in the world is pity and I couldn’t stand mine for myself and so, I avoided it. There have been lovers I have slept with who have never been told any of this, and I wonder if then, we ever truly connected, and if then, I have been living a lie. I began to think about other people like me. Uwe Boll may have some kind of part of his brain missing? You now what actually bothers me? My main hurt and emptiness isn’t even for myself rather, it’s for whoever ends up deciding they’re nuts enough to love me. To accept that in addition to being a writer, which is crazy enough, that I may wake up in pain in the middle of the night, that I may think I know what sad is and not want to talk about it, that the only way I can birth their flesh, their parent’s blood, is through a myriad of medical procedures I don’t even know I have it in me to stand. I worry that I’m going to have to say, “Hey, is your Mom going to tell you I’m not right because of this?”

In 2005, in Bangalore, a girl named Lakshmi was born. Lakshmi was born with eight limbs. Durga, the Hindu Goddess has eight arms, for one, and Lakshmi, born in a spiritual place which worships many Deities with eight limbs, was herself thought magic. I thought: there is my sister, that could have been me. I see someone in a wheelchair born with no legs, I think, that could have been me. I think ten people died while I was typing this and all you care about is trash day. I began to slowly realize that there probably would never be a child of my own because I couldn’t go through with the process. The work to get pregnant. I am not Charlotte from Sex and the City, I do not have any money nevermind an endless supply.

Then there was the Times blog about prostate cancer and my life changed. Jim Tucker started the Prostablog and it was important. Ovarian Cancer has Gilda Radner and not many men have comfort to look to, and I found the fact that he was coming out and talking about the truth of what it is like to be sick, in a non-self pitying way, in a not angry way, in just a real, honest way, one of the most important pieces of journalism I’d ever seen. He was saying he was sick, he was saying his wife was sticking with him through all of it, but more, he was apologizing to her. I felt that I was apologizing to everyone who might end up loving me before we even loved each other.

***
Photographs by Alejandra Laviada courtesy of Danziger Projects.

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