52 Search results for "anxious"

What We Carry: A Coming-of-Age Tale of Grief, Therapy, and Reckoning
by Christian M. Ivey “What We Carry” is a powerful coming-of-age story that follows Drew, a young Black college student grappling with grief, anxiety, and the long shadow of racial trauma. Get yo ass up, Drew! My alarm rang, a nasty, raggedy rang, almost soundin’ like it was yellin’ at me. Get yo ass up, […]
Resisting constant surveillance in my predominantly white neighborhood
By Gloria Oladipo I am tired of my white neighbors watching me, my family, and other residents of color. I’m anxious that their surveillance will get my Black family hurt, especially with the unchecked power of law enforcement in our community. They take pictures of us in the park. They mount “Blue Lives Matter” signs […]
The white writer’s misimagination of Black characters in science fiction
by Inigo Laguda This essay contains spoilers for Another Life (2019) and Annihilation (2018) For a writer, I read astonishingly little. I chalk my aversion up to over-inundating myself with books as a boy and filling all my curious voids with grand words and fantastical tales. It’s almost like I nauseatingly engorged myself on literature […]
Reclaiming memory as a Black father and son in the face of cultural and racial traumas
This essay contains discussions of racialized state violence and suicide attempts by Donnie Moreland I have difficulty recalling specific details of my childhood. Trauma has a way of coloring memory. Strangely, the events I sometimes beg to forget are the ones I can see with a clarity the remainder of my youth is never afforded. […]
The Cloud Weaver’s Song
This year, Fix—Grist’s solutions lab—put out a call for short stories for their first climate- fiction contest. The call was an invitation to look beyond this moment of climate devastation and dream up what the next 180 years of climate repair can be. Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, sponsored by NRDC, drew more […]
For Black women and girls who aren’t “autistic enough”
by Jo (Foderingham) Brown I remember sitting in the cafeteria in kindergarten when something made me feel anxious. When I was around this age, if I felt that way, I would physically ground myself: I’d clench my fists really hard or get up and move around. This particular day while my empty lunch box was […]
The God Shop, Part 1
By Donnie Moreland It was no later than 6:23 am, on September 19th, when Officer Jacob Dochavney discovered the two bodies in the Tacoma River. He waited to call it in. He was three days from his two week vacation he’d been hollering about since February. He was supposed to be going to Las Vegas […]
My daughter saves me from my anxieties with the embrace of her little arms
by Donnie Moreland It’s the eve of what folks are calling the “most important presidential election of our lives.” I’m being told to prepare. I’m being told to panic. I strap both ends of my cloth mask around my ears to drop my ballot at a county library. This is the second time I’m having […]
Violating stay-at-home orders directly harms Disabled folks, but what else is new?
Content Warning: Ableism, Car Accident, Death and Discrimination by Dominique Alexander McPhearson I’m in my room watching old NBA highlights, since the NBA, along with the rest of the country, is on lockdown. Quarantine doesn’t bother me as much as it seems to bother other people. After an accident left me paralyzed from the chest […]
For gay men in Nigeria, Grindr’s screenshot deactivation is double-edged
This essay discusses queerphobic violence by Nelson C.J On the surface, taking screenshots on Grindr can serve a few trivial purposes. To capture that absolutely weird or witty bio on an interesting profile, to keep evidence of a chat you and your friends might laugh over when you show them, or to save the picture […]
The quiet call of ghosts: Dusting my grandmother’s photo reminds me of who I am
by Tiffany Hobbs She has her eyes. It was the first time I’d looked longer than a few seconds into the eyes of the woman in the photograph on my bookshelf. Looking longer introduced me to the inevitability of dying and death. I was hiding from her eyes, playing a game I was determined to […]
‘Seeking for the Lost’ and the project of finding each other as a misplaced people
by Donnie Moreland “We hummed a celebration for living. For fighting. For refusing to die. For enduring when giving up would be easier. For believing, against all odds, that we’d get home someday.” —The Coming; Daniel Black “It’s nothing like losing one’s keys. It’s not as if he has been misplaced. It’s not as simple […]