Personal Essays

HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.

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Dealing With Your Cancer Diagnosis: An Existential Guide

Dealing With Your Cancer Diagnosis: An Existential Guide

It’s a known truth that shitty things tend to happen when life is on the upswing.

You just turned forty-two—at the height of the COVID19 pandemic, no less. After parting ways with your fiancé and pushing through a mammoth mental and physical breakdown, armed with hardheadedness and a sizzling double-dose of Moderna vaccine, you scratch and claw your way to a near-perfect existence. A slick dream job with stock photo coworkers on top of their game. Gamja hot dog and vegan donut picnics with your friends in Christie Park.

True StoriesGuest UserApril 19, 2023breast cancer, breasts, women, cancerComment

The Sex You Didn’t Want

The Sex You Didn’t Want

The further I get into the safety of a long-term relationship, the foggier my examples become. Each year is like another gloss of paint, obscuring. I am grateful for this obfuscation, however, a part of me wants to hold on to the memories, coloring them with new perspective as I grow in age and wisdom. This part of me wants to lose itself in the comfort of reliving the incidents, but altering the endings. This is what I would do, if it happened again. By rewriting your rape stories, you regain a façade of control.

True StoriesGuest UserApril 12, 2023sexual assault, sexual violence, rape, recoveryComment

The Middle House

The Middle House

At the age of thirteen, I attended a boarding school a continent away from my family, an experience that triggered a wrenching homesickness. As a teenager, I navigated international airports and transitioned between cultures with fluidity, yet a floodgate of tears would open at the echo of my parents’ voices over a long-distance call. They were a seven-hour flight away, too far to dash home for a weekend of hugs and home-cooked meals, distant enough for the cookies in care packages to grow stale before arrival.

True StoriesGuest UserApril 5, 2023family, Friends, friendship, father daughterComment

The Hungry Days

The Hungry Days

The sisters were hungry. They’d already eaten the things from the food bank that nobody liked. The weird canned potatoes, the sauerkraut, the can of beets. They’d thrown out the expired items and fed the can of dog food to the dog. The sisters had nibbled on dog biscuits in the past and those weren’t so bad, but they drew the line at wet food.

True StoriesGuest UserFebruary 8, 2023childhood, hunger, work, life and death Comments

Routine Healing

Routine Healing

Putting myself back together was a boring, organized process. A 1,000-piece puzzle left on the coffee table for months, or in this case, years. Finally sitting down to frame myself in sky and earth. Painstakingly searching the jumble for all those matching hooks and crevices. After the chaos of him, simply paying the bills on time was a cathartic experience. Routine was my remedy. Work away the day Monday through Friday. Come home when it’s dark. Stop at Walgreens to purchase a bottle of wine and pizza rolls. Cigarettes if needed. Home to one-and-a-half glasses of wine and the allowance of one orgasmic cigarette. The order was important.

True StoriesGuest UserFebruary 1, 2023abuse, domestic violence, Women, women storytelling Comments

Hag

Hag

I haven’t bled in five months. Each time this happens I wonder, am I done? Was that it? Have I finally crossed the threshold into after, whatever that means?

True StoriesGuest UserDecember 21, 2022women, period, aging, age Comments

Planting Holly

Planting Holly

I married my ex-husband in the early ’90s, and despite being a feminist and a working professional, I took his name. It wasn’t a difficult decision. In fact, I don’t really remember it being a decision at all. We had decided to become a family and I wanted a single, family name to unite us and the children I expected we’d have.

True StoriesGuest UserNovember 9, 2022self love, self care, names, divorce Comments

Birds Don’t Drop Dead from the Sky

Birds Don’t Drop Dead from the Sky

I’ve often wondered: Why don’t you see birds drop dead from the sky? Surely it happens. There couldn’t possibly be a mechanism that keeps it from occurring. Could there be? Something about the nature of the flight that keeps beings in a state of suspended life, no matter the outcome?

True StoriesGuest UserNovember 2, 2022disability, car accident, self love Comment

Loving Teenage Monsters

Loving Teenage Monsters

It should be illegal to have floppy hair as an eighteen-year-old boy and own a guitar. It can be a violent combination to gaze upon when you’re a girl—add to that a pair of scuffed-up Converses? Forget it, you’re dead on sight. This vision was served up to me like dessert at dusk one day while sitting on the roof of a car, and my life was just about ruined.

True StoriesGuest UserJuly 6, 2022childhood, Childhood, memoriesComment

Hot Flashes

Hot Flashes

He thought I was sexy. Funny. Fun. Interesting. I assumed that growing up in Turkey and studying engineering hadn’t offered him much opportunity to meet lots of women. I felt a bit guilty—but mainly grateful—for that.

He was from a highly educated and sophisticated secular Muslim Turkish family; he’d come to the United States to earn his PhD from MIT. I’m a first-generation born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, American daughter of Orthodox-Jewish European Holocaust survivors on both sides.

True StoriesGuest UserJune 15, 2022love, love story, husband Comments

True Love, Fairy Tales, and George R.R. Martin

True Love, Fairy Tales, and George R.R. Martin

There I was, doing an assignment for a Bootcamp on confidence, writing a vision of what my world would look like if I had unlimited confidence.

I set out to write a vision of myself as a successful author of an inspiring and hilarious memoir. Between that and my editing income, I’d be doing so well that I could afford to buy a space to build a creative retreat. But when I put my pen to paper—I wrote about love. And instead of feeling empowered, I couldn’t decide if I should roll my eyes, puke, or cry.

True StoriesGuest UserJune 1, 2022love story, love, life lessons Comments

Statistics

Statistics

My twelve-year-old son is conducting research, interviewing as many people as he can at the Hugo’s Supermarket downtown. He’s on a mission and there’s no stopping him. His statistical analysis involves the following variables: person, car driven, and favorite soda. I’m not sure which is the dependent variable, but I’m sure he’ll correlate vehicles with soda type soon. Maybe make a discovery he can sell to Pepsi. That’s his favorite one, after all.

True StoriesGuest UserMay 18, 2022mother, Motherhood, children Comments

Oreo

Oreo

We were all dressed in the checked, green gingham, but it was their bodies that moved expertly to the rhythm. They swayed their hips and shook their behinds, to Tony Matterhorn’s “Dutty Wine.” I watched from the sidelines, with a book in hand. All I could do was tap my feet. It was not in my muscle memory to jive to the steelpan beat. Our outer coating was the same—melanin rich, yet like mismatched puzzle pieces, I did not seem to fit.

True StoriesGuest UserDecember 22, 2021racism, black women, women Comment

Little Scratches

Little Scratches

I.

The neglected yard of a local abandoned house stands meadow high. Overnight, the grass floods with brown casings and red-eyed spawn. This is how it begins.

Silently, cicadas surface to molt, climb, mate. Our shoes crunch exoskeleton evidence of invasion. My daughters—five and three—stare at the creeping bark of trees, mesmerized by miniature zombie movements.

True StoriesGuest UserNovember 10, 2021writing, mother daughter, traumaComment

Communion

Communion

When I was seven years old, I spit out the body of Christ.

It wasn’t an act of rebellion, only the reflex of an unselfconscious girl I must have been once. My Sunday school teacher asked for a volunteer to demonstrate how to take communion, and I volunteered for everything then. She told us it was bread, but as soon as I tasted the wafer, I was sure there’d been a mistake—the sliver sticking to my tongue and then, suddenly, to my outstretched palm, had to be cardboard.

True StoriesGuest UserOctober 6, 2021religion, spirituality, churchComment

Birthday Suit

Birthday Suit

The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame.

—Genesis 2:25

It’s the word “yet” that breaks my heart. Why would the Bible’s authors add that qualifier, unless body shame was already, in their time, a cultural given, a feeling so immediate and gutting that the lack of mortification at one’s own flesh—its size and shape, its smells and hungers—was worth noting in chapter two of the story of How It All Began.

True StoriesGuest UserSeptember 23, 2021clothing, gender, LGBTQIA, self loveComment

My Honda Civic, July 1989

My Honda Civic, July 1989

It was a night like any other that summer. Short skirt, fishnet stockings, thick lines of black eyeliner, ruby red lips, and dancing. I’d had a line of coke before the night began, and part of a bottle of cheap wine—seriously cheap, dollar-a-bottle Strawberry Hill. It was early in the night for us, a hallway mark of 1 a.m. David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” was at the part of the song where everyone screams along.

True StoriesGuest UserSeptember 8, 2021rape, trauma, girlhood, grief Comment

Etched in Memory

Etched in Memory

Right now, I am looking at a photo of us. From a lifetime ago. Stuck within the pages of an old book, the photo fell to the floor.

True StoriesGuest UserSeptember 2, 2021grief, death, illness, survivalComment

Tell Mother that Daddy Is OK

Tell Mother that Daddy Is OK

I held in my hands the facts describing how he died. The question was whether to share with my mom the details of her father’s combat death.

True StoriesGuest UserAugust 19, 2021war, mother, grandfather, veteran Comment

The Curtain Falls

The Curtain Falls

March 14, 2020

The days are getting longer, but winter still holds New England in its chilly grip. Looking out at the empty harbor, no boats bob merrily on moorings, and the still dark water reflects the last rays of the setting sun and scattered streetlights. John and I sit in a half-empty theater, with vacant seats clustering around small groups of two or three people.

True StoriesGuest UserAugust 10, 2021COVID-19, quarantine, writing, grief Comments