As COVID-19 continues to sweep the globe, The Doe takes a look at the human body, healthcare systems and how we keep on going during a seemingly endless pandemic.

The Doe takes a look at the human body, healthcare systems and how we keep going during a seemingly endless COVID-19 pandemic through anonymous stories.

Health, Your Body & Healthcare Anonymous Stories - The Doe

Health

I spent two-thirds of my life able-bodied. When I became disabled and chronically ill, I was enraged and really upset at the lack of consciousness surrounding these things in our society. For a few years, I was in a really intense state of shock, trying to go to school and do all the normal things. I couldn't live in my parents' houses because they were inaccessible. And I was faced with the reality of the built environment of austerity laws that cover government benefits, which severely limit how much money you can make and still receive assistance. I didn't have food stamps because, at the time, if you were on SSI, you didn't qualify for food stamps, so I was stealing food to eat. I just basically thrust myself into the void of living independently with a very painful autoimmune disease and living in a wheelchair, and I just didn't find that any of the conversations around our economic system or our political system or our infrastructure or our social structure were being talked about. 

I've experienced immense ableism and harm from people of all sorts of political backgrounds and marginalized identities. No one is safe from being cruel to a cripple. I think there's a huge amount of fear of someone's own mortality wrapped up in seeing the fragility of the reality of our bodies, and I think people don't recognize how much they've absorbed the eugenic idea that if you're physically disabled, you should just kill yourself. I had a roommate tell me that he could never live the way that I did and that he would just commit suicide instead of having to endure it. And he's a leftist, a member of the DSA and he does all these things for people who are marginalized. He didn't even understand how hurtful that was to hear.

We live in a world that I know will burn up before disabled people have equal rights or don’t have to live in a segregated society. Disabled people aren't even considered by most people to be a marginalized identity. We're on the back burner, not even on the front-end consciousness of what people think of when they think of an oppressed group. There's this really bizarre sort of propaganda that disabled people live off the state and are cared for and have what they need to exist. Even in the disability community, there’s this idea that if you're visibly disabled and use a wheelchair, people are just at your beck and call and are there to help you and take care of you and that all of your needs are met, which is not true at all. 

A lot of people think disability has been solved with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and nothing could be further from the truth. The ADA didn't do anything to change the situation. It's all so performative. Every time I go into a restaurant and I can't use the bathroom, they're like, “Oh, we were built in the 1960s, so we’re grandfathered in and we don't have to be accessible.” I wanted to go to grad school, but upon further research and visiting some of these campuses, I realized that none of them are accessible. I can't get to certain buildings or rooms on campus. Some don’t even have accessible bathrooms. If you have a mobility disability, you are barred from being able to access education in a way that people who can walk are able to, whether they’re disabled or not. 

Disabled people are still discriminated against in hiring too. They make rules where someone in an office job has to be able to lift 20 pounds in order to work there, and people don't recognize that those tiny little things are purposefully put in hiring requirements so that disabled people can't work there. And in the U.S., we can't even legally work if we need caregiving because if we work, we lose our HHS and our SSI and our health insurance all at the same time. People don't even understand the ways that disabled people are forced into poverty. Their income is capped at half the poverty level in order to receive the caregiving that they need and the health insurance that they need to exist.

The reality is that we’re being systematically killed off through insurance denials or care denials or being kicked off harsh and cruel austerity programs for getting more than $85 a month in aid from friends or family for things that we need. When you start to experience disability and start paying attention, you come to realize that physically disabled people, chronically ill people and mentally ill people, when interacting with any sort of system of power, are going to be the most harmed by that time and time again. It’s a system that disables people as well.

By putting the blame on the individual, the government gets to basically not have to take accountability for the ways that they're causing harm. And they've done such a good job, to the point where even people most implicated in these systems of harm still hold out hope or belief in the systems that govern them or police systems or economic systems that have been the cause of their suffering. Anyone who can walk and doesn't need a caregiver or SSI to exist doesn’t understand the struggles of my daily life or what it's like to not be able to get married or have children because you’ll lose the benefits you need to survive. They don’t understand what it's like to not be able receive what you need to exist

No one wants to talk about SSI or reformation. Even the biggest disability advocates skim over the largest material problems in favor of talking about Britney Spears’ conservatorship or COVID, which is fine, but we all know that those issues are a huge reflection of the ableism in our society. No one wants to actually solve the real issues: accessibility and austerity. No one wants to actually solve the real issues of accessibility and austerity; even the disabled politicians in our government right now who haven't had to live off of SSI or haven’t experienced needing a caregiver or using a wheelchair. It's frustrating.

All of this stuff stems from the ugly laws that existed from the 1870s to the 1970s, where visibly disabled people and mentally ill people were thrown in jail and fined or were told that they couldn’t be seen on the streets. No one knows about disability history, which is why everyone's so confused as to where ableism stems from. If I was born in the ’40s, I would be in a mental institution with a bunch of other people who had various disabilities. Even now, people are visibly shocked to see me at the supermarket. It's wild that I didn't really know a person in a wheelchair before my accident at all. There’s just a lack of any sort of consciousness in our society around these things, and there needs to be a complete overhaul.

The idea that disabled people don't have lives worth living is utter bullshit. I'm very proud to be a disabled person. Everyone should be proud to exist and to live, and I think being proud as a disabled person is a is kind of a big “fuck you” to able-bodied people who think our lives are so pathetic. My life is really fun. I'm consistently dedicated to making each day as good as I can, despite being in the worst amount of pain humanly possible on some of them. I definitely have more sex than all of my friends.

And that’s why I feel driven to change things, even though I'm very literally sick and tired and I'm very busy doing other things and having a career that doesn't have to do really with my disability. How do you organize people who don’t have places to live? Who are unable to physically protest? You can do a lot, obviously from the internet, but it's just not as effective as what they were doing in the ’60s and ’70s, like the 504 Sit-in that got the first federal protections for handicapped people passed. We haven't had any major policy changes to benefit disabled people since the ADA passed in 1990. It’s not that advocacy can't be done from social media in some regard, but show me the advocacy that's gotten me any sort of human rights in the past ten years. 

I wish that we would stop focusing on creating more problems that don't exist and on our individual need for admiration and attention. I wish we could actually remake the world. I want things to be solved so that I can experience equality and freedom before I die.

Best of 2021

I'm Disabled: We Need and Deserve Equal Rights

When I was 28, I had an abortion at eight weeks pregnant. It was going smoothly. When the doctor at the Santa Cruz, California, Planned Parenthood said, “Now just isn’t the right time for this spirit to come to Earth,” I shrugged in response, feeling uncomfortable. She seemed to be trying to comfort me.

“I don’t think of it that way,” I said. “It’s just a ball of cells.” 

I’d always defended the right to abortion with a “no big deal” attitude—having an abortion wasn’t anything other than a safe medical procedure. This abortion was no different. It was the logical choice given my rocky romantic relationship. I didn’t think of the embryo as a human life. And I had no second thoughts based on how the abortion would impact me in the future. In other words, the idea that abortion was “no big deal” wasn’t just a political stance—it was something I believed through and through.

I projected this view onto others too. I sincerely thought that no one, save for those indoctrinated by religious, pro-life values, had any reason to experience complicated emotions around abortion. When the young woman next to me in the recovery area of Planned Parenthood was gushing tears, I silently judged her. Why would she be upset about terminating an unplanned pregnancy? If she decided she wanted a baby, then she could have one later—once she’d thought it through a bit more. But an unplanned pregnancy would ruin her life. Buck up, dear girl!

That’s where I stood before things got weird and my world turned upside down. About one year after the abortion, I went from my normal, friendly, punk-rock self to having bouts of extreme jealousy of pregnant women and women with children. I seethed at baby strollers. I also despaired that I was likely infertile (with no evidence to support this), and I suddenly felt the need to name the baby I’d lost—the one who used to be “a ball of cells.” In fact, I couldn’t think about anything but this baby. Months into this surreal turn, I learned these feelings might all be grouped under something called post-abortion stress syndrome, or PASS, for short. 

PASS is a condition in which you have some variety of negative feelings—often of regret or guilt—after an abortion. Pro-choice scholars usually claim that the condition is entirely fabricated. Anti-abortionists usually claim that it affects a large proportion of women who get abortions. 

I had never even heard of PASS before I started feeling this way. I thought I might be losing my mind until I found a non-religious, apolitical support community of women online who had experienced PASS. But my experience with PASS, and in the PASS support group, turned my world upside down in another way, too. I now had to believe that abortion could have an emotional, or perhaps even biopsychological, impact on at least some women. Because I was one of them. And, thus, my "no big deal" dogma began to crumble.

As part of my experience of PASS, I had something we in the support group called “replacement baby syndrome.” I. Just. Needed. A. Baby. It would be like bringing my lost baby back to life. In fact, I wanted this baby so much that I could no longer picture using any birth control more premeditated than a condom. My last relationship had ended, and while I didn’t want to mingle bodily fluids with just any guy I slept with, I also didn’t want to make 100 percent certain that pregnancy didn’t happen. What if my date and I decided to procreate in the heat of the moment? The best way to leave that door open was to avoid highly effective, long-term birth control options like an IUD.

My resistance to formal birth control is how I found myself, at age 29, arguing with my Planned Parenthood physician. I had moved to Oakland, California, and taken the train north to the clinic.

“So, it says here you are not using a regular birth control method,” she said. “We should talk about that.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I’m almost 30 years old, and I want to be a mother. I wrote that on my intake form,” I replied.

“Well, being a parent is harder than you think,” said the young doctor. 

“I don’t care if it’s hard,” I’d said. That’s when the tears began brimming. “You’re just saying this because I’m single and working class. You don’t think I should have a baby in my position. I told you before, I don’t want to talk about birth control. I came in for a pelvic exam!”

I burst into tears, asked her to leave and proceeded to hyperventilate alone in the exam room.

I know that plenty of Planned Parenthood doctors would have respected my wishes to focus only on the health of my vagina during the exam and not my reproductive capacities. Perhaps some would have given me information about local fertility clinics or “single mom by choice” groups so I could pursue parenthood safely. Others might have recognized that I wasn’t in a great emotional place to have a baby but might have referred me for therapy to discuss my options. 

But that isn’t what happened, and I was starting to feel that there was no place for me in the pro-choice movement anymore. I began regularly venting to my friends about the eugenic history of Planned Parenthood and the failures of the movement to acknowledge PASS or accept unconventional paths toward parenthood. 

Eleven years later, I no longer have PASS—mourning for my loss is now a distant memory. My frustrations with Planned Parenthood have long since been outweighed by the essential services they provide. I actually did end up becoming a single mom by choice. And the way I used to judge others’ reproductive choices now makes me cringe—I’ve come a long way.

Yet I’m still frustrated with where we are as a pro-choice movement. For instance, we still don’t focus enough on the ways in which choices to reproduce are affected by financial situation, racism, transphobia and relationship status. We still seem to assume that PASS is a syndrome made up by pro-lifers. And we send around social media posts that defend abortion rights by emphasizing that abortion is integrally difficult for the woman involved, as if her suffering makes her motives pure. In short, pro-choice seems to be equal parts narrowly defined (the choice is about abortion rather than reproductive rights generally) and all over the place (PASS is not real; abortions are always hard).

There’s no perfect moment in history to critique the pro-choice movement. We seem caught in an eternal battle over who gets the power of choice. And the outcomes of each battle fought are weighty: They stand to impact the mental and physical health and the life courses of roughly half the population. If you do believe an embryo or fetus is a life—and many in the United States do—then we are also hashing out whether or not everyday women, including homeless women, teenagers and others, are allowed to become custodians over life and death. 

Still, in light of what I’ve learned, it seems essential that we go beyond “pro-choice.” I suggest naming this new stance “pro-option.” I want us to have the option to believe that fetuses are human life as well as the option to believe that they are not human life. I want us to have the option to abort and the option not to abort—whether it’s a life or not, whether it’s a planned pregnancy or not. I want us to have the option to have babies inside or outside of wedlock, with or without a stock portfolio, at any age we choose and whatever our color or gender identity. I want us to have the option for continuing social support, however the chips may fall—whether we end up regretful or relieved, with PASS or with postpartum depression or with a “happy accident” in the carriage. 

Being pro-option means listening to the vast range of reproductive experiences teeming around us. Being pro-option opens up new avenues of support to women and people of all genders, whatever their background or desires or constraints. And for this reason, a pro-option movement might just grow stronger than the movements that came before it.

I Was Staunchly Pro-Choice. I Was Shocked When My Abortion Was Devastating

Dad: You’re my canary in the coal mine. This is your area of expertise. When you tell me to worry, that’s when I’ll worry.

That telephone conversation seems like a distant memory now. It’s hard to believe it was less than 18 months ago he called. My father. Looking for advice, looking for clarity on COVID-19 from his little girl. The one with a PhD in immunology. We had no idea how much our lives were about to be upended by a global pandemic.

I grew up in rural, small-town America with a tight knit extended family. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—we were all well and truly enmeshed in one another’s lives. Football games, concerts, county fairs, church services. Our holiday get-togethers were always large and chaotic. Turkey and pumpkin pie with the whipped cream piled a mile high. I loved it all. But then…I left. 

 In my defense, I didn’t have much of a choice. Whereas my cousins chose college majors like education and agribusiness, with jobs waiting for them back in our hometown, I fell in love with immunology. And jobs in my field only existed thousands of miles away, in cities that were the polar opposite of my childhood home.

Immunology is the study of how the body differentiates self versus non-self. How it mounts a defense against pathogens (i.e. bacteria, viruses) but spares healthy tissue. It’s a complex subject. More complex than an article like this could ever hope to convey. And perhaps that’s part of the problem. I have a PhD, postdoctoral fellowship and half a decade in the pharmaceutical industry and, still, aspects of the immune system confound me. Experiments yield perplexing results. The human body can be a bit of an enigma.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, my family was so proud of me. I was their big city doc, the one they looked to for answers. Does vitamin C really help with a cold? Why must I finish this antibiotic? Do we really need to be concerned about Ebola, Zika, the swine flu? On Facebook feeds and emails, I tried my best to translate the complex clinical work of myself and others to the layman. I thought I was successful at gaining understanding because my family largely followed my lead. They praised me. 

But in retrospect, their embrace of my advice was more likely because at the end of each communication, my “don’t worry” sign-off was exactly what they wanted to hear. Ebola, though deadly, was unlikely to see a large outbreak in the U.S. Too difficult to transmit. Zika was a worry to those pregnant or intending to conceive, but none of my family fell into that category. And swine flu? So long as we all availed ourselves of the updated flu vaccine, daily life would go on. 

At the beginning of 2020, the scientific community had limited data on COVID-19. First reports from the hot zones were vague. It was a viral respiratory illness, likely caused by a coronavirus. With just this to go on, researchers like myself did what we do best: make hypotheses. Conjectures. Assuming COVID-19 behaved like other coronaviruses (i.e. SARS, MERS) then A) all that contracted the virus would have respiratory symptoms and B) the infected would spread the disease primarily after these symptoms appeared. The mortality rate, at the time, seemed comparable to the seasonal flu. Like so many others in the field, I thought humanity could handle this with travel restrictions and renewed emphasis on hygiene. If we stopped hoarding the toilet paper, we’d be OK.

But as the trickle of data on COVID-19 turned into a shower and finally a monsoon, few of those initial hypotheses would hold true. COVID-19 was a far more complex and nefarious beast. There were asymptomatic superspreaders and troubling symptoms beyond the expected respiratory issues (e.g. blood clots). Plus, mortality figures for the population at large were misleading. Parsing out statistics revealed some demographics to be at a far greater risk. My demeanor, my response to family inquiries notably shifted. Lockdown, isolate. Now! It must have been jarring.

My father handled it in stride. Perhaps because he had been my confidante at a rocky point in my own doctoral research. I had spent over two years working on the hypothesis that overexpression of one gene could cure a rare immune deficiency. It didn’t. With that failure in mind, my father didn’t seem surprised that health recommendations in a global pandemic could change. He was willing to give the researchers some leeway as they grappled to understand this novel virus. The rest of my family? Not so much. 

My aunt was the first to lash out. I was “letting fear consume me” in supporting the quarantine and mask mandates. The virus was still no big deal in her eyes, and unless I could “stay positive,” maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all. And I’ll admit, in their small, rural community, that first wave of COVID-19 was barely perceptible. A few elderly casualties, who arguably were soon to die anyway. The restrictions seemed overkill. Where I lived it was another matter. One Sunday, I counted and there were 25 pages of obituaries in the local paper. Twenty-five. Friends were sick; others had lost family members. I knew colleagues on the front lines, testing potential treatments, potential vaccines. And I knew the insane hours they pulled. I suppose that’s what made my cousin’s Facebook post hit so hard.

Cousin Mike, let’s call him, extolled the virtues of hydroxychloroquine. He called it the “hidden cure” that we scientists were keeping from the world. I tried to reason with him. The paper that he cited had fundamental flaws. The patient number was low, the methods of blinding the study questionable. A researcher saw what he was desperate to see: hope. I looked up the clinical trials that followed that initial publication. There were hundreds registered. But no one was able to replicate the results. It wasn’t real. But Mike didn’t care. He saw no harm in taking the drug, so long as he “believed it would work.” I was stunned. I was saddened. And I was worried for the patients with malaria and lupus I knew legitimately needed that medication.

In the wake of a subsequent wave of insults from Mike, I’m ashamed to say I started to censor myself on social media. I didn’t unfriend my family, per se; I just…stopped engaging.

What I did post had security settings carefully calibrated to avoid their eyes. It was for my own mental well-being. But maybe it was the wrong move. Maybe I should have fought a little harder for scientific truth.

The holidays were surreal. Unable to fly home, my parents joined me over Zoom for meals made in our two separate locales while at the same time, aunts, uncles and cousins elected to covertly assemble in person, breaking official gathering size limits in the name of “tradition.” I held my breath for 14 days afterward, praying they would stay healthy. They did.

And I was buoyed by the news that an emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine could be on the horizon. Historically, my family had always been receptive to vaccines. Collectively, they were even known to mock anti-vaxxers. Surely this would be what would end our divide. It didn’t.

My parents were early in line to get the jab. I cried. Big heaving sobs of relief. But much of the rest of my family resisted. Their social media feeds were peppered with memes mocking the shot. And I, oddly, could see their perspective. Their only personal connection to the the pharmaceutical industry was me. And in the long time I had labored at the lab bench, I didn’t have a single drug approval to my name. Projects I worked on were still mired in safety and efficacy studies. Thus, my family’s suspicion as to the speed of the vaccine’s approval was understandable. And in their eyes, in a city far away, I did live an “extravagant” lifestyle. 

Prior to the pandemic, my Facebook feed had been filled with pictures from concerts, sporting events, art gallery openings. Things they considered “bucket list,” I did every week. Thus, claims of drug profiteering in their eyes would appear to have merit. And I had lost my means to defend myself, to defend science. No questioning emails came my way.

I wish there were a better ending to this article. The situation remains tense. And I feel for my parents. They’ve placed their faith in me, in science, and sacrificed precious time with loved ones as a result. As the Delta variant surges and the hospital in my hometown reaches capacity, I just hope and pray we all continue to skirt disaster. Because I love my family. Through it all, I love them.

My story is not unique. Many friends and colleagues in science find themselves in a similar position. We’re tired, so tired. Caught in some twisted cultural gaslighting of our life’s devotion. What comes next? My greatest fear is that other therapies being developed for cancer, autoimmunity and heart disease may meet a similar fate to the COVID-19 vaccine. Rejection, no matter how effective. How do we bridge this divide?

I'm an Immunologist; My Family Are Anti-Vaxxers

Ten years ago, I finished my university degree, packed my life into two rolling suitcases, boarded a plane leaving Washington, D.C., and left my sweet American home for Wales to marry the man who is now my husband. Up until leaving, I hadn’t had to consider how to cover any medical expenses—doctor appointments, medicines, hospital treatment, etc. I was lucky enough to have both a mom and dad whose jobs included ample insurance for dependent children, under which I still qualified, while attending college. Paying for my medical care was just something I hadn’t ever worried about.

Once I left the nest and came to live in the U.K., though, my adulting began, and in a matter of days, I realized that my care was now my own responsibility, including how I would ensure my medical needs were met. 

The first step was getting myself signed up for a general practitioner. Bear in mind, when I first moved over, I didn’t have a job—I was here on a fiancee visa and couldn’t work—but my status didn’t affect my ability to register with a local doctor. If I had an infection, needed a test run or wanted birth control, my local GP was happy to help me, even though I wasn’t married yet. 

After seven months of being engaged, my husband and I got married, giving me the right to work and pay taxes into the system that provides us with the National Health Service (NHS). From what I understand, after listening to complaints from my family in the States, President Obama tried to introduce a form of healthcare that would be more accessible to all Americans, no matter their socioeconomic status.

My family, a white, middle-class family, found Obamacare offensive. I’m not exactly sure why—perhaps they thought it was the start of socialism, the worst enemy of the white middle class. A couple of family members ranted about how they didn’t want to use their hard-earned money to pay for someone else’s healthcare, which would then tarnish their own care. Ironically, when they’ve come here to visit, we've had to visit the GP for them to get antibiotics that they didn’t have to pay for. 

The thing is, the NHS is the primary reason I would never move back to America. My husband and I work ordinary jobs that don’t particularly pay well. Yet we are privileged enough to never, ever have to worry about whether or not the medical needs of our family will be met. 

Let me just give you a roundup of all the NHS has done for us. 

Generally, we have had every antibiotic, eczema cream, reflux serum, steroid, birth control and asthma pump completely covered. To get them, we attend the GP, they listen to our complaints, make a diagnosis and then write a prescription that we take to the pharmacy across the street. With three little boys who catch every virus and infection—and a husband with Crohn’s—these expenses would add up quickly back in the U.S. 

Next up: having babies. It is completely unbelievable that I would have had to consider the cost of birthing a child had I lived in America. I was high-risk through each of my three pregnancies, meaning I was seen every two weeks by a specialist who prescribed a blood thinner to inject into my stomach every day.

My first child was induced but waited three days to come out. His delivery was horrific and painful, and I had to stay an additional three days to recover. My second child required an emergency C-section, and I stayed in the hospital three days after he was born to recuperate after having my stomach sliced. My third was a planned C-section, but I was brought in early due to reduced fetal movement. These overnight stays and births cost thousands to the system, but we didn’t have to consider the cost as we brought life into the world.

The greatest cost came following the birth of my third child. Doctors quickly realized that something was wrong after he was delivered. His breathing wasn’t right due to a lung that hadn’t formed properly, and he was rushed to an NICU over an hour away and kept on the ward for a month. During this time, my husband and I were given a small flat to stay in nearby so we could easily access our baby boy. 

When I was chatting with one of the nurses on the ward, she told me that the cost of having a baby on the ward, before any medications or treatments or surgeries were given, was 1,000 pounds per day. Because of the NHS, we could simply focus on getting our boy better—not counting up the cost of his care. 

The most recent expense I have to thank the NHS for covering was my cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which I received following a period of postnatal depression. For weeks, a psychologist met with me to help me work through the severely negative thoughts I had after having my kids. She was my angel, guiding me to right, logical thinking. There is no way I could have afforded that, but it brought me out of the worst of my dark days. It was priceless. 

You see, the NHS is a miracle. Sure, we pay high taxes. Sure, some people abuse the system. Sure, we have to linger on waiting lists at times. But I consider those three “downsides” totally worth it for expert care that is always available no matter your circumstance, no matter your status, no matter your monetary worth. 

America, you have a right to be jealous of the NHS.

Americans Have No Idea What They're Missing With Their Healthcare: An Ode to the NHS

Drugs & Alcohol

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

LGBTQ Voices

Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

“Look at how cute you were!” The text from my mother was accompanied by a photo of me at around 8 years old, when I was a flower girl at a relative’s wedding. The bride and I wore white dresses; we each held a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath. My smile was naive, milk teeth showing. I was missing one in the front. I’d seen the photo before but not for years. A rock formed in my stomach; I knew it was me, but I didn’t recognize myself as that little girl. I tapped the screen to close the text app. I wept. 

My parents divorced when I was 5. At 7, we moved in with my mother’s old flame. He drank. He’d soon turn violent, and my mother would follow suit on both counts. We didn’t know that when the photo was taken. 

I was a precocious child and a voracious reader. I knew big words but not always what they meant. I was probably also a little sassy, a combination that didn’t bode well around grown-ups who liked to drink and sometimes got violent when the empty beer cans began to pile up. My childhood had scores of fill-in-the-blank details regarding alcoholism and domestic violence. However, this story is not about those years. 

The violence and alcoholism escalated. I lashed out. In homes like mine, this often happens. Someone becomes known as the black sheep, and the family pins their issues on them. I was that sheep. My mother gave up custody when I reached 13 and turned me over to the family court system. Over the years, my placements ranged from juvenile detention to residential programs to group homes. 

The goal of the foster care system is to reunite children with their families, if possible. My social worker was kind and saw a bright something in me that she knew the system would crush. When I was 14, she helped my mother make plans to move to Arizona near our closest relatives. This was a beacon of hope, a carrot on a stick; once my mother moved away from her boyfriend, I’d be able to go home. I talked about the move with my counselors and the other kids. That summer, I had a hard time thinking about other things. Moving to Arizona was a mantra I couldn’t get out of my head. 

“You’ll go home as soon as we can get your mother on her feet,” my social worker said. I studied her dark ponytail and glasses. She was younger than my mother. She’d never lied to me. It was easy to believe what she said. 

“How soon?” I asked. “When will I get to go to a new school?” I weighed the possibility of moving right away and starting my first day of high school in Arizona rather than another placement.

“When are we moving, Mama?” I asked. I was on a day pass. On Saturdays, I was allowed out for a few hours. We went for Italian food at a strip mall restaurant every week, then we’d run her errands. I pushed spaghetti around on my plate. I’d always order water and the cheapest item on the menu so my mother could save up for the move.

“Soon. I just need to get some things in order.” 

My mother dragged a piece of bread through the sauce on her plate. It was always a similar answer: “I need more time.” “Soon.” “Be patient.” It took me a long time to realize she was only ever saying, “We’ll see.” Later, she’d drop me off at the residential center and go home to her boyfriend. 

Summer came and went. I started high school in the same center. I spent holidays there when some of the other kids got to visit home. Home was still unsafe for me with my mother’s boyfriend there. I trusted my social worker and my mother. I believed she was moving. Someone would have told me otherwise, but there were delays. I didn’t know what they were, but it was easy to convince myself that I was at fault. 

I considered the delay often, wondering what I’d done to make her mad. I needed to be better: better behaved, better grades, better daughter. I obsessed over this but never arrived at the correct answer. “Good enough” fit. I vowed to make myself good enough that she’d finally move and let me come home. 

Fast-forward through my teenage years. I bounced around from placement to placement. Moving to Arizona lost its form as language. It was as much a part of me as my hair color or the shape of my hands. My mother was moving. All I needed to do to get her there was to be good enough.

We never moved to Arizona. I believed I wasn’t good enough. I turned 18 and aged out of the system. 

Fast-forward through my 20s. I was angry but lashing out only at myself. There was nobody around to tell me certain things weren’t a good idea. There were drugs, some worse than others. I took my clothes off for money. I pierced and tattooed myself in regrettable ways. I went to jail. Twice. I was not good enough, and I was hell-bent on proving that to myself and everyone else. 

Fast-forward a bit more, because I got my shit together in an exceptional way. “Good enough” and “moving to Arizona” had been there since I was a teenager and they’d never left. It was the only way I could relate to my mother. Thus, without realizing what I was doing, I spent many years demonstrating that I was good enough. I got an education and a good corporate job. I have initials behind my last name. I married well. I spent lavishly on my mother; I had no idea how else to demonstrate “good enough.” 

I had anxiety. I had mood swings. I had insomnia. I had medication to dull everything to a perfectly flat line. However, regardless of my achievements, I never stopped trying to be good enough. Sometimes, anxiety paralyzed me when I’d leave my mother’s house. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t need to. I had a pill for that. 

Circle back to my cell phone, the text message, “Look at how cute you were!” and the photo of me as a flower girl. 

“That little girl had no idea,” I sobbed to my husband, referring to my photo in third person. It was an ugly cry. I was red-faced and shaking. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. He wrapped me in his arms, unsure of what to say. My tears dampened his shirt. He knew every inch of my history. “She might as well have been following a bouncy ball toward the edge of a cliff.” The child in the photo had never been hit, kicked or slapped by a grown man. She’d never let strangers pay to touch her. 

What is the opposite of a damaged human? The answer is that photo. I was shattering in my husband’s arms, remembering what I’d been through: physical violence, abandonment, longing for my mother to love me enough to move to Arizona and all the ways I laid down in the gutter in anger at myself. I pulled away from my husband. 

“Look at how cute you were,” I repeated my mother’s text message between sobs. “You did this to me,” I spat at her, sobbing, even though she was many miles away. I collapsed into my husband again. “You never moved. That little girl had no idea what was coming.”

I had a powerful moment of clarity: I’d spent decades trying to be good enough when it was no longer feasible for me to “come home.” Our entire relationship was based on what moving to Arizona meant to my teenage self. 

I haven’t spoken to my mother in a few years. You’re not supposed to say this out loud: I wish she would die. I’ll mourn, not for the loss of her as she is but for the loss of the mother I never had. I’d like to get it over with. I want to grieve for that little girl, begin to heal myself and finally move on. It won’t break me, because I’ve built a solid support system in my life. However, I know it will try. 

Love

Ancestry

I Wish My Mother Would Die So I Can Get On With My Grieving

My daughter was born in a village. I didn’t mean for it to be that stereotypical, that the village was like a precursor for having a home birth. I didn’t feel like I had to do it the way our great-grandmothers did it, but rather, I saw my options and chose the one most suitable for me.

When I found out I was pregnant, I hit Google hard. Home birth Bosnia, home birth Balkans, birthing center Bosnia, midwives Bosnia—anything that didn’t put me in a hospital. That was a choice not tied to some strong anti-medicine mentality but more because I was anti this particular medical establishment. My town is still ethnically divided, a result of the war we passed through between ’92 and ’95, so choosing a hospital feels and is much like a political decision, choosing sides. And because of our country’s poor economy, good hospital treatment often means an envelope with an extra tip for whoever is taking care of you just to be sure you, with the money, are treated generously. Aside from that, I’d been to the hospitals. The bathrooms were missing toilet paper. The place was void of a smile. Patients looked more like prisoners to me. People leave my country because of the medical treatment; that’s where we’re at.

Online, I found information about a Bosnian woman who had birthed her child at home with the support of a traveling midwife from the U.K. A combination of local laws and her prior mistreatment at the hands of Bosnian doctors while giving birth led her that way. It wasn’t that the act itself was illegal, but rather, having the assistance of a Bosnian midwife was. By attending, that midwife would risk jail time, loss of licensure, who knows what else? Here, no registered midwives were willing to take such risks anymore. Instead, women from my country would find midwives living outside of the Western Balkans—Austria, the U.K., Slovenia—to come and support in home birthing here if they were able to cover the costs and if they were able to find someone. That’s how it goes with women’s rights: They’re not always outright forbidding a right in itself—in this case, the right to choose how one births—but instead are left to manage the obstacles obstructing one’s journey. 

Sitting on the grass with my phone in hand, I searched for the woman's contact information by Googling the first and last name I had found through the article I read about her activism toward women's birth rights in Bosnia. When we connected, she warmly gave me resources—names, numbers, helpful hints. It felt like female camaraderie at its finest.

I made dozens of calls, emails and text messages to a handful of midwives in Europe explaining my position, asking for their time or to scan their networks for anyone who might be willing to travel to Bosnia to help me. If I managed to reach anyone, I was either referred to someone else or just rejected due to distance or availability. Somewhere down the reference line, an Austrian woman agreed. Some weeks later, we realized there was a misunderstanding and that she actually wasn’t willing to travel to Bosnia for the birth, but rather, we come to her.

That was an option—we meet her in Croatia. For her, this was just a few hours over the border from Austria. I would pay several thousand euros for her services, plus the cost of travel, renting a home in the town we planned on staying in and whatever additional costs can usually be calculated into a month of not being home. It was a lot on many levels.

Though the plan was seemingly set, I still kept an open window in my mind for having my birth in Bosnia. As much as I tried to settle, something just felt off. During that time, there was one wild card—a woman in Bosnia who actually attended births here. She was one I’d previously played phone tag with, attempting to schedule dates to talk outside of scattered messages that never resulted in an actual conversation. She always stayed in my mind, but her inability to quickly respond to my requests for a meeting made me insecure and distrustful. I was entering my third trimester. I needed some certainty.

By the end of my seventh month of pregnancy, I was exhausted. The birth was approaching faster and faster. I realized that the idea of traveling nine hours by car to sit in an Airbnb that wasn’t mine, in a country that wasn’t mine and working through the loops of registration and embassies during a time when I should be recovering just sounded exhausting. I didn’t want to find out how the actual act of it would pan out.

I tried her again, the wild card. Just in case. Finally, we spoke. Firmly, she said, “Yes, I’ll be there.” Not a midwife but a birth keeper. Someone who had trained like they did in the past: by attending many births themselves. No certification, no Dr. before her name. This was new to me, but I trusted her experience. She told me that I must keep her name private and that she would arrive when I called her. 

I still felt uneasy. We hadn’t met, not even for a video call. She skipped our appointment to do so, and then I didn’t hear from her for days. I began to get paranoid that she’d been caught, that her offering her support was finally the thing that exposed her to the authorities, that our unforgiving country would make an example out of her. I felt panicky. My partner fumbled between reassuring me she’d be there and then questioning how open I’d been with others about her offering her support. I was skeptical of my smartphone, of colleagues who suddenly felt like spies. I felt guilty for not being more careful, for mentioning home birth in text messages or announcing I’d be birthing here at home.

My contractions started in the middle of the night. I sent her a text message to tell her what was happening, and she began to follow me and my progress. She was located several hours away, so updates ensured she knew where I was at and would make it in time. By eight that evening, it started—real labor. I was riding waves of contractions while simultaneously messaging her to check in on her whereabouts. Please—I wanted to, but didn’t say—assure me you’ll be there.

She said she’d be leaving her location in the afternoon, so I expected her in the late evening. At one point, her phone was off for two hours. There I was, in the middle of what really felt like birth, and she was gone. All my fears—affirmed. My friend who had flown in to be there with me began Googling “free birth” on the couch next to me. We thought, “OK, I might land in a situation where I do this mostly on my own.” Several scenarios swept through my mind. I tried to focus on the more loving ones. Regardless, I was silently scared. If something went wrong, how would I forgive myself?

Several hours later, sometime around 11 p.m., my phone buzzed. The clouds parted—it was her. “Just come,” I said. Directing was the next thing. In between contractions and screaming, I calmed my voice to try to understand exactly where she was and what signposts she’d missed to get to us. Eventually, my partner got on his bike to direct her through our streetlight-less village. Just after one in the morning, she was there. 

It was the first time we’d seen each other. There, in my most vulnerable, primal state, I was shaking hands with and hugging the woman who kept me in a state of suspension—will she make it, will she not make it? She made it. Outside, her partner waited in their car, an act he was probably used to by now. Inside, she spoke gently about the movement of my birth. I asked her to measure me, to see how far I was dilated. She asked, “Why?” That was how her assistance was: power-giving, nonintrusive. She wasn’t there to guide my birth—that was my job. Rather, she was there to support me, and I felt that.

The village was so quiet at night, I felt like I’d awakened everyone with what I tried to make moans but turned out to be screams. At some point, with my legs spread open to her, my amniotic sac, which hadn’t yet ruptured, popped in her face like a violet water balloon. Then the head, then the shoulders. My partner caught our baby in his hands and, with a smile on his face, put her in my arms. I fell back onto the bed, which we’d covered with a plastic sheet, with our baby in my hands, shivering. Exhausted. Relieved. Our four dogs were the quietest they’d ever been, just sleeping in the room with us.

The midwife gave us one hour while she kept her partner company outside. When she returned, she helped direct the act of cutting our baby’s umbilical cord (the scissors are still sitting in a pencil case on our shelf). Then, she asked if we minded that she do her morning prayers in our one-bedroom home. She set her rug directly in front of my bed, facing the rising sun in the east. It was four in the morning. Still in my euphoric state, I remember the streaks of orange and yellow coming in through the windows and thinking, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

She said she’d be back in a few days to join us for dinner, to check in on me and breastfeeding. She said she’d be passing our way again. She said she enjoyed our company and that she’d like to stay in touch. She said, “Just go to the hospital and register your baby. Don’t tell anyone my name.” She said that for her, it didn’t feel illegal; it was what should be done. She said that they have a motto, the women who do this work—those who need us, they will find us.

Registration was a witch hunt of its own. We were tossed from building to building, with words like “social services” and “court” and “law” thrown around. The midwives in the local hospital looked at me like I was a criminal. I still felt like an open wound, holding our newborn daughter in my hands and feeding her in various bureaucratic locations, just wanting to be back in the safety of our home, just wanting to know no one would touch us, would touch her.

We told no one anything, just that we had the assistance we needed, that I was healthy, that I trusted my body to do what it needed to do. It was the first home birth anyone we went to remembered. Our story made them dig through old file cabinets, find paperwork they forgot existed. Eventually, it happened—her birth certificate with the name of our village listed under her place of birth. To celebrate, we bought flowers and apple juice to bring to the women working in offices who initially had no idea how to help us. It was big.

And as for the midwife, the birth keeper, the brave soul who came to us in the night, I never saw her again. Messages—unanswered. Nothing.

Why? I don’t know. It happened, this I know to be true. The dark maroon stain from where I pushed her out and into the world on the front side of my bedpost tells that story, and my body remembers it.

Women

I Had an Illegal Home Birth

For some strange reason, it was far easier for me to love and accept my body during the start of the pandemic and the isolation that came with it. As a body positivity advocate, I feel like a fraud for feeling like this, for disliking parts of my body I once preached to love.

Growing up, I had a tough relationship with my body. I was never a slim child or teen, and I’ve never been slim throughout my early, mid or late 20s. I battled bad body image throughout school, but at 18, I discovered the body positivity community on social media and felt like I was on the right track.

Having always been a bit bigger—plus size, if you will—it has taken a lot for me to get comfortable with my body, and the lockdowns at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be the ultimate solution. For me, the series of unexpected stay-at-home orders in 2020 felt like a chance to heal and explore—maybe even to find self-love. I learned to love my body in ways I never knew possible and began to accept what society had taught me to loathe.

Keeping myself isolated and secluded from the world in order to stay safe meant I only had myself to compare myself to, leading to the biggest boost in my confidence in ages. There wasn’t anyone around to judge my body or what I chose to wear. I wore bikinis for the first time in years, and I found ultimate happiness when frolicking around my home in nothing but knickers and a T-shirt.

Finding my footing with body positivity, I documented my journey on Instagram through photos of my body, stretch marks, cellulite and belly rolls. Inspiring others and seeing myself in this new light allowed me to truly accept my body in an entirely different way than ever before. Instead of disliking it and comparing my flaws to the perfections of other people, I learned to love everything about my body and what it does for me.

When stay-at-home orders began to lift and life resumed to a new normal, things started to go downhill. Negative thoughts and harmful old habits slowly crept up on me: I found myself comparing my body to other people again, worrying what they thought of me, my body and my size.

My sparkle slowly began to fade as a more normal life returned, and I soon felt the need to change my body. Fearing fatness after finding peace in the word, I became worried that I was heading in the wrong direction. I’ve completely reversed all the progress I’d worked so hard for.

I felt—and still feel—like a complete fraud because I'm supposed to be a body positive advocate who loves her body, accepts it for what it is and is confident no matter what. But instead, I’ve been struggling with constant negative thoughts all year. I constantly ask friends and family if I've “gotten bigger” or if eating a certain food is “bad.” That self-love and understanding I’d built in quarantine was swiftly and immediately erased when the world opened up again. I’ve backslid so much that I fear I’ll never reach my peak positive self again.

Midway through spring earlier this year, I hit a real rough patch with my body positivity journey. Feeling like I was “getting bigger,” I succumbed to buying an exercise bike to tone up. In my teens, exercise was a grueling task that was only done to lose weight, but I didn’t want to lose weight this time—I only wanted to maintain it. I thought working toward maintenance would help keep negative thoughts at bay. But ever since, I’ve had diets on my mind, toying with the idea of fasting, drinking slimming shakes and adopting restrictive habits. Knowing that kind of lifestyle would be detrimental to my mental and physical health is the only reason I haven’t succumbed to those extremes…yet. 

Feeling like a fraud isn’t fun. Promoting body positivity and self-love online while I secretly battle with feeling ugly, disgusting and like I need to slim down isn’t great either. But I am working on myself again and ensuring I take my own advice. Reading through old social media posts where I preach about loving the skin you’re in, moving for joy instead of as a punishment and eating good food to nourish my body in an intuitive way are all helping. And I’m wearing clothes that make me feel good. I’m faking it until I make it.

Sometimes, when I get home and look in the mirror or see a photo somebody took of me on a night out, I’m overcome with wishing we were back in lockdown so I could be that version of me again—the me who loved her body and didn’t care what people thought, and the me who truly accepted every inch for what it was and how it served me. But I'm working on it. I’ll find her again.

It Was Easier to Love My Body at the Height of the Pandemic

COVID-19 made me sick. I still am, even though I am now in my fifth month out of quarantine. It was unbelievably scary to be by myself while being forced to confront the weirdest sensations, both physical and emotional. Being unable to support my body weight meant having to propel myself by clawing my way along walls or crawling around my home just to cobble together enough food to feel full before falling asleep. I lost pockets of time. My legs were too weak to pull me up or to propel me forward; my feet moved in front of me of their own accord while an invisible weight at the front of my body immobilized me. Dizziness and sickness surrounded me. The pain in my chest and everywhere across my body was unlike anything I had ever experienced. 

Testing negative got me out of quarantine, but the recalibration back to “full health” over the following weeks left me having to relearn basic functions while dealing with debilitating dizziness. I have not reached back to myself yet either. My doctor could not grasp what was wrong—despite the myriad of testing—yet I had to adapt everything I do: how to dress, how to prepare food, how to take care of myself. I didn’t write or type for weeks. No one talks about how anxious this makes you afterward. I felt unsafe in my body when trying to engage socially; that feeling has not fully gone away. When I tried to take three flights of stairs at speed, the little monologue voice inside me whispered, “This is how you die.”

I am still not well. But the most shocking and unpleasant thing I have to deal with now is the focus on my weight loss. Quarantine meant one small meal a day; I have lost all appetite since, and it is only slowly returning. Anything food-based feels so unbelievably wrong. It’s not a taste or smell issue, as mine remained intact. Preparing food was so overwhelming, tiring and often left me feeling nauseous. Eating would be fatiguing, but it made me feel worse internally while dealing with a physical battle. Emotionally, it could be upsetting, which I worked to hide; it sparked no joy, and the simple act of chewing could also contribute to painful symptoms flaring, sometimes for hours. In the aftermath of coming out of quarantine, I analyzed myself in the mirror, noting I could start to see my ribs, the concave of my hips, a more defined chin. I looked tired beyond belief. Trying to hide this has been futile. 

I am trying my best to remain independent in dealing with the fallout of a COVID-19 infection, on top of my disability needs that already existed. But this often feels like it is too much to bear. Young people are allowed to be sick, and COVID-19 can disable us too. We are not failures for being the exception to the expectation we should “bounce back.” 

Why is sickness deemed to be “sexy” when someone presents as having lost significant weight? It affords a sickening sexual currency in a patriarchal world. Older men have creepily commented that my apparent thinness has made me suddenly attractive. A female friend suggested I work to stay thin, as apparently I am now “beautiful”; this stung, as if to suggest my femininity was somehow enhanced by a disease that has left me struggling and could have contributed to an early grave. Work collaborators think it's appropriate to tell me, “We need to feed you up,” while pushing food toward me. I have worked hard to not need validation from external sources, but all of the comments opened up the chink in my armor. My post-quarantine body is not a compliment or a good thing and is not for the gaze of anyone to objectify or fetishize. 

Heroin chic was fashionable not that long ago. Female icons who dominated the cultural landscape of my childhood were praised for their tiny frames. One of my parents worked to counteract this, instilling the need for a healthy body image and therefore a healthy relationship to food. They played me Alanis Morissette and P!nk and showed me how magazine images were airbrushed to seeming perfection. Sugary snacks were often limited, while we were allowed to explore the world of cosmetics freely. 

I hated feeling cold all the time when just out of quarantine. I disliked the over-definition of my hips, my ribs; this is not healthy but has slowly improved since. It is indicative of a capitalist society that to be thin is to be attractive, to have a worth based on visual merit. Women’s worth is based on their body, and it is so often equated with money. The fetishization is profitable. But this is so inherently wrong, immoral. Feminist writers have documented how the insecurity is planted then later profited from. Sexism reigns supreme, from all involved. 

I have missed food, the pleasure of consuming a favorite meal, the sense of community this brings to the social fabric of our lives. Sickness is not attractive to me. Life is for living; my worth will not be defined by a body that has failed me or through the way it’s perceived by others. I have worked to recover. I still have so many steps left to work toward. The hamster wheel of appointments, follow-ups and letters is overwhelming. No medical professional seems to want to understand my situation. We set up healthcare on inherently ableist, sexist criteria. Navigating this has so often made me want to give up, but to be as healthy as possible is my ultimate aim in the end—healthy at an acceptable level to myself and myself only. My thinness is not problematic in a medical setting. Outside of that, it apparently suddenly makes me interesting, worth more. Patriarchal rape culture is a sore that has been allowed to fester in the pandemic, it seems. 

I’ve tried not being angry about this, and it has been fruitless. I feel resentful that sharing food with anyone now always leads to comments about my lack of an appetite, how I look or even my dietary needs. It makes me self-conscious, as if I somehow have to ask permission to just enjoy myself. Innocuous conversations circle around to how attractive thinness is. The misogynistic messaging has been internalized; failure to question what we are taught, and unlearn harmful things, will be our downfall in the end. Examining the body of someone else is not appropriate. 

Sickness is not attractive; when we see it that way, we fetishize. The sexism in this should be as unpalatable to everyone as it is to me. Being out of quarantine, only one person ever asks me how I am and how I am doing. To learn to be OK with yourself and deal with the murky perceptions of others is mind-boggling. I am tired.

My COVID Weight Loss Isn’t a Good Thing

It used to be that when something good happened, I celebrated with a drink. If something bad happened, I would drink to forget. Something that started out as fun became a habit out of boredom. I ended up with multiple bruises from falling while blacked out, a sprained ankle and a jammed finger just because I wasn’t conscious enough to watch what I was doing.

It didn’t help that my friends couldn’t ever think of anything else to do other than meeting up to get drinks. Although there were times when I wound up taking care of others when they’d had too much, there were also many times when I was the one throwing my fist at people who were trying to take care of me. Drinking would result in me being late for work or missing it completely, canceling things that I had already paid for and having some people distance themselves from me because I was too much of a mess. 

I was drinking when I first met my boyfriend. I woke up in a daze that day. My mother had passed away less than a year before, and the only way that I knew how to deal with grief was by drowning it. A friend of mine, whom I had rarely spoken to, had invited me to a small holiday get-together at her apartment. I worked late the night before, but naturally for me at the time, I continued to drink after work. I had every intention of going to the party, but I slept in. In my dream state, my mother appeared to me, and we talked about how she was deceased. I will never forget what she said.

“What do you mean? I’m here with you, and you are here with me.”

She had passed away from an illness, but she went into a coma first. It had been almost a year, and she told me she wasn’t dead. I went on to explain to her that she was. Then, she suddenly told me to wake up and go to the party. 

I stumbled in late with two bottles of Prosecco in hand, and there he was, sitting in the corner alone. Without thinking about whether or not he would think I was batshit, I said to him, “My dead mother came to me in a dream and told me that I had to come here today. So here I am.” He was honest, thoughtful and definitely not scared of me. And he was over 15 years clean. He didn’t seem to care that I was drinking, but it would be a topic that came up more in the future whenever I drank to the point of inebriation. 

My friends hate the fact that my boyfriend is sober. Being with him meant that not only would I stop being the fun party girl that my friends loved (or pretended to), but his sobriety also forced them to look in the mirror at their own issues. They were also covering their pain with intoxication. They also drank when they were stressed out. They also didn’t have any other bright ideas about what to do outside of our local dive.

The truth is, although I was also apprehensive, being with someone sober has saved my life. I grew up in a family with a lot of substance abuse issues. My mother would take any type of medication she was offered, and my brother died from a mixture of drugs. I never felt that I needed a fix, but I had immersed myself in a city with a culture that felt like you had to have booze to have fun. After meeting my boyfriend, who had been sober in the same city for longer than I had lived there, it became obvious that it wasn’t a requirement but a hobby that was formed from whom I hung around.

When I first started seeing him, I listened to the advice that my friends had to give. Some told me that they feared a sober partner would try to control me. “He’s going to constantly be comparing you to himself,” others would say. After much thought, I realized that people were projecting their own trepidation onto my relationship. If I listened to them, I would still be drunk and alone. I would end up losing out on something great just because I took advice from an outsider looking in who had their objections.

I’ve had relationships with people that were only founded on drinking, and they didn’t last long. I had friends who would refer to me as a drinking buddy, as if there wasn’t anything else that I could bring to the table. My boyfriend saw me as something more than that. He saw me as someone who was adventurous and passionate and was dying to get out of a dimly lit bar to live my life and do all of the things that drinking with my friends was holding me back from. 

I’m not sober. I never felt I needed to drink, but I felt like sometimes I couldn’t figure out anything else to do. My boyfriend has never pressured me to become sober like him, but he has encouraged me to look at my actions. It’s hard to follow through with our goals if we’re constantly looking out of one eye while struggling to keep the other one open. I learned that sobriety isn’t just about having a drug addiction but about a state of mind. Many people can stop the drug but still be an incredible pain in the ass with a negative view of life. I didn’t feel like I needed to ever stop drinking completely, but I could see myself quickly turning into a relentless, bitter old soul with no room for improvement. I needed to focus on fixing my mentality and working through the wounds of my past instead of repressing them. 

Being with someone sober has shown me that life is what we make of it. When you don’t have a vice to rely on, you become clearer in your thoughts and patterns. You become more emotionally mature. I could never fully heal from my past before because I wouldn’t allow the pain ever to sink in. I wanted to go and party with my friends and forget about any sort of suffering rather than do healthy things for my mind and spirit. Drinking to black out might have made me forget momentarily what was hurting me deep down, but it didn’t erase it. One night out could turn into many, and its negative effects on my physical and mental state could last a lifetime. Unfortunately, I know many who have gone far too soon because of this behavior.

I feel that my relationship is more fulfilling than one that meets in bars and stays there. We take short trips together to plan outdoor activities instead of booze-related events. We have hiked mountains, swam in oceans, camped in some of the most beautiful spaces in the world and learned new hobbies together. I started focusing on myself more, even while I was with him. Many people form codependent bonds, but ours allowed us to focus on ourselves even while we were together. I began doing the work deep down that I had been putting off for too long. I started painting again, which I hadn’t done since high school. I started doing athletic activities and things that were good for my body instead of poisoning it daily. I found more soul-fulfilling things to do with my time, and I was with a partner who encouraged me to be creative rather than be in the center of a superficial scene.

I know that when my boyfriend shares thoughts, he means what he says. I know that he is always listening and won’t forget our conversations. And most importantly, he decided to do the work he needed to do on himself, as tedious as it might be. This type of introspection that comes with sobriety is something that most of us retreat from, whether or not we have an addiction problem. It’s the type of work that requires us to look at our flaws and assess our path in life, and it’s the type of work that is impossible to do when we’re impaired. 

Maybe this is what is so frightening to others?

My Friends Hate My Sober Boyfriend

In March of 2022, just three months before the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, I discovered I was pregnant. My partner and I do want a child, but after many (many) tearful (and difficult) conversations with him, my mom and one of my closest friends, I decided I wanted an abortion. I was in the middle of a long-term creative project that meant a great deal to me, and I struggle with anxiety and depression as it is. The idea of trying to finish the project while also carrying the pregnancy to term made me worry that I’d end up resenting the resulting child or my own creative work, and I didn’t want either outcome.

I wasn’t concerned about access. I live in a progressive city in a progressive state; there are several Planned Parenthood sites within short driving distance of my apartment; and although my insurance didn’t cover the procedure, I was lucky enough to have the savings with which to pay for it out of pocket. While it wouldn’t be easy emotionally, I thought—naively, I now know—that scheduling and receiving the reproductive care I was seeking would be relatively painless. 

You need to know a few things about me that are relevant to these events. I have been chronically ill since I was a kid, with migraines beginning at around age 6 and other forms of pain coming on over time. As many chronically ill people know, figuring out what’s going on with you can take years, sometimes decades. After much trial and error, many tests and unhelpful results and doctors upon doctors who doubted or dismissed my experience, blamed my pain on my mental illness or implied that it was imaginary, I’ve been left with no small amount of medical trauma. As a result, I feel extremely on edge whenever I need to interact with healthcare services, which I unfortunately do fairly frequently.

A couple of years ago, I finally learned that I have a genetic condition that cannot be cured and that has been contributing to my pain for my entire life. On the way to getting this diagnosis, I was also inadvertently diagnosed with some other things that I never sought out, including mild sleep apnea, for which I have a BiPAP machine that I almost never use anymore.

When I showed up for my first Planned Parenthood appointment to talk to a nurse about the abortion process and my options, I found out that the organization’s call center—which was the only way I could contact them throughout this process—had scheduled me for a pregnancy test instead. The nurse apologized for the screwup. I peed in a cup, and I asked my questions. While she tried to be kind, she was also unwilling to give me straight answers. I didn’t need guarantees; I needed reassurance that most people can conceive again after an abortion, because the myth that the procedure could cause infertility was rattling around my brain. Instead, the nurse gave me vague responses about how many factors would come into the future possibility of pregnancy, like my age and any potential health conditions.

It was clear to me what was going on: The clinic’s safety came first. The nurse hedged because if she gave me anything like a guarantee, I could potentially sue her or the clinic for providing false information. Even worse, if I were an anti-abortion activist, I could be recording her so as to later blast Planned Parenthood in the press or on social media for promising something she legally couldn’t. It makes sense that Planned Parenthood, like other abortion providers, needs to cover its collective ass in the face of threats and outright violence. The trouble comes when this takes priority over patients’ needs, which is what happened when I finally got my abortion.

The week after my first rather pointless appointment, I was scheduled to get a surgical abortion with twilight sedation on a Tuesday. Monday afternoon, I received a call from the Planned Parenthood call center and was asked some basic medical history questions, including whether I had any blood circulation issues. I have POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), which for me means I frequently get head rushes when I get up, and I mentioned this because it’s related to circulation. The phone rep, who didn’t know what it was, had to talk to her manager about it. After a brief hold, she told me that I’d need a letter from my primary care physician giving me approval for the procedure and that I wouldn’t be able to get the abortion the following day after all.

I started crying. Now that I’d made my decision, I wanted to be done with it already, and while my symptoms had been mild at first, by this point, I was so constantly nauseous that I could barely move or eat, let alone work, and was spending most of my time on the couch watching Scooby-Doo and moaning. After some more back and forth, during which I tried to explain that I’d had two operations in the past couple of years with more serious anesthesia, I was eventually transferred to a manager who told me that I could keep my appointment and that the clinic would contact my doctor while I was there to receive her verbal approval.

Tuesday morning, I was at the clinic early. When I talked to the receptionists, it quickly became clear that the call center had once again screwed up. Verbal approval wasn’t a thing; I’d need to get that from my PCP in writing. I’d contacted her the previous night, and I called her office as soon as it opened that morning. All I could do now was sit in the waiting room, hoping for the best. The TV was on loud, set to Bravo, which was showing back-to-back episodes of Friends. They weren’t sequential, but they did share a theme: Each and every episode’s plotline involved a pregnancy or a baby. It was almost funny. Here we were, a bunch of pregnant people lucky enough to have access to a clinic that had no anti-abortion protesters downstairs, only to receive pro-baby propaganda from reruns of network TV in Planned Parenthood’s own waiting room.

Finally, at 10:00 a.m., a nurse told me that they wouldn’t be able to treat me that day since they hadn’t heard from my PCP. I started crying again. The nurse told me to come back on Thursday at the crack of dawn.

Thirty-six hours of nauseous misery later, I was back at the clinic, two copies of the signed doctor’s note in my bag. The TV was on the same channel, and though I didn’t recognize that morning’s sitcom, the episodes I glanced at while waiting to be called back were once again about babies and pregnancies.

I was exhausted, nausea made worse by breathing my own dehydrated mouth smell in my mask (I had needed to fast since the night before), but I was also feeling relieved. By the end of the day, I would no longer be pregnant. When the nurse called my name, I jumped to follow her, nervous and eager to get the process going. I filled out more consent forms, checked off boxes on a more extensive medical history, changed into a paper gown, texted my partner and tried to calm down.

“I see you have sleep apnea,” a nurse said, going over my forms. I told her it was very mild, that I didn’t even use my BiPAP machine. Her eyebrows scrunched above her mask. “I need to check something; hang on a second.”

My lips started to quiver. Something was wrong. Again. I would need to leave. Again. I’d be nauseous and pregnant for who knew how much longer.

“OK, so here’s the thing,” she told me when she came back in. My face was hot, and I could feel something beyond the sadness and frustration rising in me. She explained that my sleep apnea made me a high-risk patient, and because of that, only a certified registered nurse anesthetist (CRNA) could administer twilight sleep. The CRNA had been in yesterday but wouldn’t be back for another two weeks.

“But wait,” I said, trying to control what I now recognize as rage. “My doctor knows about my conditions. She still gave her approval for the abortion. With anesthetic. She clearly doesn’t think I’m high risk.” Over and over again, I said some variation of this. The nurse just shook her head and repeatedly explained that it didn’t matter, that if they’d known I had sleep apnea, they would have told me about this.

So why didn’t they know? Because they’d never asked. Because they never told me what conditions would make me ineligible to receive anesthesia from anyone other than a CRNA. They never told me this was even a possibility, and it had never occurred to me because I’d been under full anesthesia for surgery on my elbow the prior year and for my wisdom teeth removal the year before that. Now it felt like I was being punished—not for getting an abortion but for being chronically ill and for telling the truth about my conditions. Thinking back on it, I should have lied.

Follow Us