It’s 1967, I am 19 years-old, and I am pregnant. I don’t understand how this can be. I think it’s impossible to get pregnant the first time you sleep with someone. I cannot have a baby.
Diana Freid, 1967
My boyfriend asks around and gets a name and a number. I have $100, and he borrows the rest. I meet his friend’s girlfriend, Mary, a nice Catholic girl. She tells me what to expect. I think, she is not the kind of girl who would have an abortion, and yet she did. If she can do it, so can I. As the date gets closer I think about a baby, our baby, growing inside me. I still don’t understand how this could happen. I cry. My boyfriend says he’s glad I feel this way. It means someday I will make a good mother. I cry harder. He borrows $400, and the date is set.
It’s in New Jersey. Nothing good ever takes place in New Jersey. It’s stinky and ugly, and we get lost. Eventually, we end up in one of the rundown working class neighborhoods. I’m scared and cold. I’m numb.
It’s all very cloak and dagger. The drop off is four blocks from the address. He lets me out of the car. I am supposed to arrive alone. I have the directions and $500 in cash in a plain white envelope. I walk down the streets. Time slows down. Suddenly my eyesight is incredible, my hearing superhuman, and I feel every footstep that takes me closer to the door. I spot it now — the shabby green two story house with the paint peeling off it, a sagging porch in the front. There are no signs of life. I walk up the three steps and ring the bell.
She answers the door in a short white nurse’s uniform, cap and all. Her mouth has thick red lipstick on it, and she has a heavy Jersey accent. She looks like she is straight out of a porn movie. I watch her lips move. She says, ”Go in the bathroom there. Take off all your clothes and leave the money on the back of the toilet.” I do as I am told.
I come out of the bathroom completely naked. I’m told to lie down on a metal table in the hall. I’m cold and exposed. I can see into the next room where the one before me is getting it done. I hear her breath, the gasping intake, the soft groan. Standing between her legs is this man — dark and hairy, unshaven. The doctor? I guess he is. He is wearing a large plastic butcher’s apron. It is splattered with blood.
Then it’s my turn. I walk in and climb on the table. Something happens. An interruption. The man walks out of the room leaving me there, legs in the stirrups. There is a muffled conversation in the hall. His wife called. He is angry. “I told her to never call here when I’m working.” There is more whispering. I guess the nurse is his lover. Then he’s back. He doesn’t say a word. I stare at the ceiling. It hurts a lot. I bite my lip and turn my head away. A few tears trickle down my cheek. He goes about his business. He doesn’t say a word.
Finally, I’m helped into another room and lie down on a narrow couch. The doctor sits next to me and massages my abdomen. He is looking in my eyes and smirks. He continues massaging me, a little lower. I am completely creeped out.
“Be a good girl, now,” he says and hands me a prescription for birth control pills. A few minutes later the porn nurse arrives and brusquely tells me to get dressed. Then I am ushered out the door. I feel disoriented. I’m shaking and bleeding and unsure of the way back to the car. I’m in shock, putting one foot in front of the other. But, I did it. I was brave. I survived. Some women die. I know I was one of the lucky ones. But, it didn’t feel that way at the time.
• • •
Diana wrote and performed her story as part of TMI Project’s 2013 production, What to Expect When You’re NOT Expecting: True Stories of Slips, Surprises, and Happy Accidents, a collection of true stories centered on the ways people exercise freedom of choice when faced with an unplanned pregnancy.
When we’re married about a year John asks me, “Are you ready yet?”
“No!” I exclaim. We get Sam, a cat.
Six months later, the same question. We get Herman, a dog. But I can only put my husband off for so long. He’s 33, I’m 25, and he wants a baby. Now.
How can I tell him I’m scared? Not the ordinary kind of scared that engulfs most first-time parents. I am terrified. I am not a first-time mom. I am a sinner. I committed the most heinous crime: I gave up my child for adoption. It has been eight years since I gave up my son. I am absolutely sure I will be punished with the wrath of God.
I’m sure that as soon as his sperm meets my egg, lightning will strike my uterus; my whole body will go up in smoke. The baby will have the most hideous deformities this world has ever seen — all because of what I did at 17.
• • •
It’s August 8th, 1964. Joe is twenty-five. I still have fairytale notions of finding a prince who’ll treat me like a princess.
If I had been a whole girl, one with boundaries, solid with self-esteem, I would have refused his ride. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.
I’d romantically envisioned Joe showing up for our first date in some kind of chariot; he shows up drunk, in an old car with a hole in the floor and one door tied shut with a wire. I willingly get in, rain peppering me through the window that won’t close.
As the evening progresses, Joe gets drunker. At the drive-in, he pushes me down. “NO!” I shout. He doesn’t seem to hear me. I have never had sex before and am not sure what happened. I stumble to the ladies room and yes, I am broken.
My cycle had always reliably been 28 to 30 days. When it gets to be 35 days and nothing is happening, I start to panic. When Joe calls to arrange a date, I tell him I’m late. He says we’ll talk about it at 7:30 that night, when we are to meet. He never shows up.
My girlfriends say to buy Humphrey 11 pills. They’re supposed to bring on your period. Then I hear quinine pills will do the trick. I walk alone to the drug store to buy them. I’m embarrassed and ashamed. They don’t work. I talk with my girlfriends about abortion, but none of us know how to get one. We hear you can go to Puerto Rico, but you have to pay $600. I keep playing hooky from school because I can’t concentrate.
When I finally tell my parents, my father says, “Don’t you know that a woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down?” I quit school. I visit the priest, who tells me, “Adoption is the only option.” I arrange to go to St. Martha’s Residence in Newark. At home, we pretend that my belly isn’t growing bigger. This is not really happening.
I can’t understand how my mother won’t talk to me about this when she went through the same thing! In 1938, when she was twenty-two and unmarried, she got pregnant and had to run away from home. She told no one. All by herself, she had my sister, Lois, and gave her up for adoption. Twenty-five years later, she watches me go through the same nightmare, but says nothing. How is that possible?
At St. Martha’s, I am with other women who share the same shame and find strength in each other’s company. Each night we sit around sharing stories of our pasts and our hopes for the future. We don’t discuss the pain that is to come, or what to expect with labor and delivery. We’ve heard horror stories from the girls who went before us about the mean nurses at the hospital. No joy will be found in this birth.
When the baby is born, I spend two days with him, counting ten baby toes and ten baby fingers on his perfect baby body. I tell him how much I love him. I keep his first baby picture. I feed him and name him Paul Joseph. On the third day, I say goodbye to the sweet baby boy. Mom and Dad finally come to take me to sign the papers. On the way home, we stop for drinks.
• • •
Eight years later, when I am 25, my husband and I have no trouble conceiving. Every occurrence around this pregnancy and birth stands in vivid contrast to the dark experience of my first one. John reassures me that this time I will not be alone and I’m not — we go to classes together to learn about every step of delivery and birth. At 17, when my water breaks, I don’t even know what just happened — no one ever told me that was going to happen. The nuns don’t explain a thing — they just call a cab to take me to the hospital — alone. At 25, I choose my doctor carefully, making sure he’s well versed in natural childbirth and will allow me to nurse my new baby on the delivery table. At 17, I have to use the doctors that Catholic Charities picks. Natural childbirth is not an option, and before I know it, I am heavily drugged for the delivery. At 25, John coaches me in Lamaze and never leaves my side. At 17, each contraction, experienced alone magnifies the pain and sorrow.
My new in-laws and everyone I know gathers to shower me and my new baby with gifts. Even people I don’t know well send presents to celebrate this new life. The other one is given nothing by the people who love me most, not even acknowledgment. In my second pregnancy, I join La Leche League to learn how to breastfeed and welcome this new baby into our family; as a teen, I have to figure out how to give up my baby, with no guidance, not even from my mother who went through it before me.
On the day of delivery, John drives me to the hospital. We talk to each other and connect before we experience this ancient rite of birth together.
After seven hours of labor, she arrives. No devil child comes that day. She’s a perfectly beautiful sweet girl. She comes bounding into the world smiling. We call her Eva.
• • •
Alice wrote and performed her story as part of TMI Project’s 2013 production, What to Expect When You’re NOT Expecting: True Stories of Slips, Surprises, and Happy Accidents, a collection of true stories centered on the ways people exercise freedom of choice when faced with an unplanned pregnancy.
One morning when I am 14-years-old, I wake with my stomach turning. I run to the bathroom to vomit. This goes on for a few days. I believe I have a stomach virus.
My friend accompanies me to the doctor, where they give me a bunch of tests. The nurse comes in and tells me, “Congrats, you are pregnant!”
“Pregnant? No, the hell I am not! How could that be possible? I’m only fourteen. I’ve never even had a boyfriend.”
“Well, sweetheart, you had something cause you are surely pregnant. About 12 weeks to be exact!”
My friend turns completely white in the face from shock, as do I. “Girl, are you keeping secrets from me now?”
Oh, yes. I am keeping secrets.
• • •
No one knows that three months ago, I woke up to him pumping on top of me, the smell of alcohol on his breath, a white powdery substance resting on the tip of his nose, sweat pouring down his face. He had this dark look in his eyes as if he lost his soul and became the devil.
“What the hell are you doing? Get off of me, you nasty bastard!” I screamed as I fought back, trying to escape his powerful grip. But he grabbed me even harder and pulled my hair.
I spit in his face. The next thing I remember is his hand around my neck, choking the shit out of me. I started to see black, red, and yellow spots appear in front of me. Things begin to fade away slowly. My vision finally gave out. When I woke up, he was asleep next to me, his body odor attached to my flesh.
• • •
Now, in the doctor’s office, I touch my stomach and feel what’s growing inside me, and I know it is his. I cry. I am so afraid to share this with anybody. I feel the same way I felt when my grandfather violated me — scared, alone, depressed, hurt, and damaged.
I am just a child myself. I am too young to have a baby. I continue to live life as if nothing has changed, even as I gain weight, and my stomach expands. I begin to feel a little compassion for my unborn child. But, my inner thoughts will not have it. I always hear a voice saying, “Rid your body of this demon seed.”
Four months have passed, and I am still unsure of what to do. My grandmother starts to notice the changes in my body. One day, when I’m on my way to school, she asks me flat out, “Are you pregnant?”
“Yes, grandma, I am.”
She explodes angrily, calling me names instead of offering the comfort I so badly need. I begin to cry, yelling at her, “This is not my fault. It’s yours! You think this is easy for me?”
“Well, you are not keeping that baby and remaining in this house.”
Now my whole family will be involved. She is sure to tell them what a whore she believes I am. What she doesn’t know is that I don’t want to keep this bastard child. Not another minute do I want to carry the child of a demon in my womb.
When I walk into the clinic, I see what I would have never imagined: Girls mostly my age dealing with the same thing. It’s like walking into the pits of hell. Filling out the papers, I begin to cry. The compassion I do not want to feel for this child returns.
Lying on the table, I ask God for forgiveness for what I am about to do. The doctor says, “Young lady, I need you to count to three. When you wake up, this will all be over.” Tears in my eyes, I picture the child’s face looking like some of me and some of him. “Please, God, forgive me for sending him back to you. He is only a child, and he deserves to be loved. Something I know I can’t do. I abort this child with a strong belief that he will be the angel you sent to watch over me.” A peace suddenly falls on me. I close my eyes and finally count to three.
I guess once this is over, I can finally tell my grandmother the secret I’ve been carrying for five months now: The child I’ve just aborted was mine and my brother’s child.
• • •
Shai wrote and performed her story as part of TMI Project’s 2013 production, What to Expect When You’re NOT Expecting: True Stories of Slips, Surprises, and Happy Accidents, a collection of true stories centered on the ways people exercise freedom of choice when faced with an unplanned pregnancy.
I don’t know if I deserve to live in America. I have a job I love and feel safe in my house and have a colorful backyard.
Do I deserve to be free? Why me? Why can I sleep at night?
I think about the other immigrants, the ones who are in the camps right now, away from home, away from their favorite foods, their friends and families. Instead they are locked up in a room full of strangers. I imagine how it feels to spend years planning, leaving everything they know to chase The American Dream, to have a better future, but now the only dream they have is to get back home safe.
I am not better in any way. I am not more kind. I am not more wise. Why can I sleep at night?
What about the people that I left behind? The architects, doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs who are living in Mexico trying to live a simple life, maybe trying to buy a house or pay their debts, but they just can’t.
I am not smarter. I don’t work harder. I am just another one. Another Mexican. Another immigrant. Another human.
Why can I sleep at night?
Perla participated in a TMI Project online mini-storytelling workshop. This story was received as an online submission following the worksop.
Last February, Erica Chase Salerno, a friend, and TMI Project storyteller passed away from Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. It’s Breast Cancer Awareness month and while I’ve thought of her every month since her passing, the influx of pink ribbons is sparking memories.
Since 2012, TMI Project has offered two 10-week storytelling workshops a year in collaboration with the Mental Health Association of Ulster County (MHA). The mission of the program is to destigmatize mental illness through true storytelling. Earlier this year, Theresa Haney (she/her), a Red Hook-based creative arts therapist, participated in one of these workshops. What follows is her monologue adapted by Chronogram Magazine for print.
Be sure to check out each monthly issue of Chronogram through December. A story from TMI Project’s archive will be published in every issue for the remainder of the year!
In the face of racism and the daily microaggressions churned out in a white world, Zanyell (she/her) spends years starving herself and self-harming in an attempt to disappear until she finds yoga and starts to feel more comfortable taking her rightful space in the world.
Storyteller Zanyell Garmon wrote and performed our Story of the Week as part of TMI Project’s newest Black Stories Matter true storytelling performance Black Stories Matter: Truth to Power, which was presented at Pointe of Praise Church in Kingston, NY on June 21, 2019. Read on below.
The air is humid, my skin still damp from swimming in the creek. My arms are swinging, feet skipping in time with my friends. I’m about ten or eleven years old. I smile and feel a sense of belonging, like in my favorite movies when you’re with your group of close friends.
Then, one of my friends turns back to look at us and laughs.
“Zanyell, it’s so dark I can’t see you,” he says.
My other friends either laugh or stay quiet. At first, I don’t understand what he means, but when I do, I fall silent too. It isn’t a conscious thought in the moment, but I know that this is when I decide I don’t want to be seen; not for my blackness.
I start to worry about how I look, how I act, and how I’m perceived. My mother tells me I have to work twice as hard because I’m black and a woman. It’s exhausting, but it soon becomes an obsession. In high school, I get called an Oreo because I speak white and listen to the wrong music. I’m placed on the honors track with mostly white students and I’m told that I act like I’m “better” than my black friends. Black and white beauty standards are also different. My mother praises my curves and my “J-Lo” booty while my white friends often ask me if their butts look big or their hair is too poofy.
I watch America’s Next Top Model and see thin women with straight hair and straight teeth. On the dark web of Tumblr, I re-blog women with thigh gaps and protruding ribs, straight hair, and sunken in eyes. I fantasize about what it would be like to be them.
In a chat room where we talk about anime, I use a picture of a blond white anime character, as my avatar. It takes me a couple months to think, oh wait, I’m lying. I don’t look anything like that.
In real life, I wear extensions and perm my hair. I skip meals to lose weight. The first day of high school, after I starve to lose almost 30 pounds, my friends say, “You look so good!” At 99 pounds, I have achieved my original goal, but I still feel like I take up too much space. Ultimately, I want to disappear.
I meet Caitlin online. She’s bulimic and self-harms like I do. The cutting help us control the pain of overwhelming emotions. It’s the intense shock of that pain, cutting into the flesh and drawing blood, that distracts from the feelings we can’t handle. I feel like she’s the only one who understands. We starve together, compare our calorie intake, offer support on the days when we felt weak. We promise that we’ll get better together.
“Don’t die on me Cait. We can do this,” I tell her too many times.
Her grandmother sends her to mental hospitals, deletes her accounts, and takes away her phone but she always finds a way to talk to me again, texting me from new numbers and messaging me from new blogs.
The last time I speak to her, she is withering away, 86 pounds at 5 feet 11 inches. And then, when I’m in 11th grade, Caitlin disappears. I have no way to contact her, no last name to look up. I search for her for a year and can’t find her. Just like that, she disappears. I decide I will not disappear like Caitlin.
A friend brings me to a yoga studio. The teacher is black. It’s a very diverse and authentic yoga studio. Doing yoga makes me feel better.
I spend a month in an ashram in Nepal training to become a yoga teacher with other American trainees. We practice yoga three times a day and three times a day, eat the same meal of rice, dal and roti. Eating is difficult for me at first. I cry a lot and everyone in my group is supportive. They are like a family to me. I realize that I’m eating with people who genuinely care about me and that this food is meant for me to eat. I begin to take up more space in my own body.
One day, we all walk an hour to buy ingredients for a chocolate cake. We make the cake and everyone eats it. The workers at the ashram eat the cake. Even I eat the cake. That was a very good day.
Returning from my training in Nepal, I stop practicing yoga three times a day and fall into a really bad depression. In the middle of my hopelessness, I meet Ryan. He tells me ‘you need to breathe,’ and he just sits there and breathes so calmly and deeply that I have to breathe with him. Ryan is like a beacon of light, guiding me through the vast oceans of my sorrow. He teaches me to trust, to love and truly connect again with another human. My walls come down and I let him see me, but only the parts I have let myself see.
One day, lying in Ryan’s arms, I announce, “I’m going to change my hair.”
As soon as I say this, my heart starts beating quickly. He has only seen me with my twists and I worry what his reaction will be. My struggle with my hair is one of many that I keep in a locked box. I have not been “natural” since a young child. My mom has learned how to do this crochet weave in style, one that will change my twists to free flowing natural-looking curls. She says I need a change, and I reluctantly agree.
Ryan smiles, “Yeah?”
“I’m excited,” I lie and he agrees.
But when it’s done, he doesn’t like it. His hands awkwardly pat my weave of ringlet curls.
“It’s so big,” he says.
“I don’t know if I like the fake curls,” he says.
“Why don’t you go natural?” he says. “How do you wash that anyway?”
His words sink into the pit of my being. Now the box is open and I’m bombarded with flashbacks. The white customers when I worked at Shoprite asking the same questions, making the same statements in condescending tones.
“How long does that take? It can’t be all yours. How do you wash it? Can I touch it?”
I don’t get why my hair seems so exotic to them. Haven’t they seen other people wearing these styles? I feel like a spectacle. An animal at the zoo. I try to summon the courage, gather the words to express my relationship with hair, one of the most hated and loved aspects of my blackness. I see Ryan as another white male who will never understand. All the love we share and he will never understand. I remember his statements about being colorblind and wonder how he sees me? Did he forget I was black? Did my disappearing act work better than I thought?
“Don’t shut down on me,” he says.
My friends told me this would happen, that he would not understand. “It’s ingrained,” they said. “Implicit bias.”
They tell me “Your new style makes you look more black, that’s his problem. He just got comfortable and forgot you were black.”
“You’re putting up a wall,” he says, and I was.
Weeks pass before I remember my decision to be seen, to be true.
One night, over dinner with Ryan, I open the box. I say “You asked me to go natural but you don’t understand this is a battle I have to get through.”
I tell him what I went through in school, constantly perming my hair to make it straight until I got braids. How random people want to touch my hair or ask me, ‘‘How do you wash your hair?”
The same ignorant question he asked me. I tell him that my hair is a part of my blackness that I both love and hate. The shock on his face is almost comforting. Maybe what everyone said about him is not true. We speak about intentions, other microaggressions, my feelings on black hair, on blackness. As I see me, he sees me.
He says, “I just want you to feel free and be yourself. If this makes you happy that’s all I want.”
“I love you,” he says.
I start to feel that I can trust him and trust his intentions. I can’t always expect him to know things but when I do talk about these things, he really listens to me. We can communicate through this.
I don’t have to run away and I don’t have to disappear. I am learning to love me, my body, my hair, my blackness, my soul.
Would you like to see the full production of Black Stories Matter: Truth to Power? Download our Viewing and Discussion guide and host a viewing party! https://tmiproject.org/host-a-viewing-party/
“All my life I tried to stay quiet no matter what but a noise inside of me has roared to be set free.”
Storyteller Cherie Hanley (she/her) wrote and performed our story of the week during a 10-week TMI Project true storytelling workshop presented in partnership with the Mental Health Association in Ulster County (MHA) in spring 2019.
While our storytellers rehearse their BRAND NEW stories, in preparation for Black Stories Matter: Truth to Power, taking place on June 21st at 7:30pm, we’re diving into TMI Project’s archive. This story by Odell Winfield was presented as part of TMI Project’s first-ever intergenerational Black Stories Matter performance, as part of Black History Month Kingston at Pointe of Praise on February 16, 2019.
In 1954, Odell (he/him) told his third-grade teacher that he wanted to be the President of the United States; she told him it would be at least 150 years until a Negro is elected president. Today, Odell is the Executive Director of the Library at the A.J. Williams-Myers African Roots Center in Kingston, NY. In his story, he reflects on his life and finds himself standing strong, feeling like the leader he always dreamed of being.
On Friday, June 21st, join TMI Project at Pointe of Praise Family Life Center in Kingston for Black Stories Matter: Truth to Power a live storytelling performance featuring a cast of new storytellers who participated in a recent Black Stories Matter weekend intensive writing workshop. Black Stories Matter: Truth to Power will feature brand new stories that attest to the startling varieties and travails of the Black experience in America, and the shared threads of love, loss, fear, and kindness that connect us all. The free performance will be live streamed on Facebook, and will be followed by a facilitated community discussion about race, identity, and inclusion.
On Sunday, June 2nd, TMI Project joined the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center at the 2019 Hudson Valley Pride Festival and March. It was a beautiful day, and we met so many inspiring LGBTQ+ community members and allies who came out to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the NYC Stonewall Riots. TMI Project was fortunate to have Woodstock Day School student and photographer Tonya Dechar capture portraits of visitors to our booth during the festival. Each person Tonya photographed participated in a true storytelling activity for LGBTQ+ community members and/or allies. Below are some of our favorites. We hope you enjoy reading these short stories as much as we enjoyed collecting them. Happy Pride Month, everyone!
“I came out on instagram as genderfluid/pansexual on 3/31/19 (my mother’s birthday). My mother is an ally but doesn’t believe my gender identity nor sexuality because I have a straight boyfriend. Today, I came out to my boyfriend as genderfluid. I love the community and everyone a part of lgbtqa+.” – Alison
“My best friend came out to me towards the end of our senior year of high school. She was sobbing, and asked me not to hate her. The way her family reacted was so disheartening. They still believe it’s a “phase.” My response to her was that I could never hate you, and you love who you love. I still try to remind her, myself and others everyday to just be yourself; you’re beautiful just the way you are.” – Tayler
“Chelsea Manning inspires me to fight for justice. She made enormous sacrifices to tell the truth about the Iraq War and the US Military and has faced years of imprisonment and solitary confinement (torture). As a trans woman, this experience has been horribly traumatic for her, but she stays strong and refuses to compromise her morals and testify against Wikileaks, so she has been imprisoned again. Her struggle is all of ours.” – Eli
“Growing up, I have been a part of and have been close with many folks in the LGBTQ+ community. I grew up with a very accepting mother, but living in a small town in Missouri was hard for a lot of my friends who were picked on by not only classmates, but family. I have and always will be someone who will listen and be there for you, no matter how you identify, I am your ally.” – Autumn
“My mom took 10 years to come around to my coming out. I was patient and fought to make sure she understood what was important to me. When she finally came around, she went all out: she wound up moving to a different church and switching denominations completely so that her faith still stayed intact, but her love for her son could shine through.” – Blake
“In the trans spaces that I am a part of, it is really beautiful and heartwarming to see how much support and community is formed between people. Like with my best friend from childhood, after reconnecting with me, against my fears, she supported me whole-heartedly. Likewise, I was lucky enough to help her come out and find herself, and I am as proud as can be.” – Ravenna
“As a lesbian, sometimes men will try to convince me that they could turn me straight, and that I’m ‘not really lesbian.’ It scares me, how predatory they sound when discussing my sex life without my consent.” – Jess
“I overcame doubting myself. I always took what people said I should be and what I should do and went with it, but doing so just left me so much more confused in the end. I had to realize that I need to follow what I feel and want in my heart and soul and stop doubting and questioning myself based on others’ opinions. The only thing that matters is how I feel and what I want and if it makes me happy. And everyone should get the opportunity to do that.” – Marlana
“My coming out experience was that of an emotional one, I started out with a written letter explaining my sexuality and my gender; I’m attracted to females but I identified as male, so for the generation my mum grew up in, in a not-so-open household, she never heard of what a transgender person is, but years down the line I’ve been more accepted and respected for my identity.” – Angel
“While leaving pride last year, I had a motorcycle accident, which resulted in a helicopter landing at the pride event. I spent 1 week in the hospital due to a shattered patella that required 2 surgeries. With the help of my teammates, mid hudson misfits roller derby, a lot of PT and a 3rd surgery, 1 year later I am back at pride, playing roller derby and riding motorcycles again. I could not have done it without such a wonderful community.” – Mimic
“It’s the second pride I’ve every been to in 2019. I’m walking around the festival and saying ‘hello’ to my friends during and after the march. It’s hot, loud, and crowded, and I walk up to a merch stand with flags, pins and clothing. I spot some pansexual pins in the corner, and feel a rush of excitement and nervousness. I’ve only out to a couple of people, and I’m no stranger to bigoted comments, but this is pride. After a moment of thought, I decide to buy one labeled ‘pantastic.’ As I continue walking around, I see a boy from my school. He is 3 years my junior, with curly hair, freckles, and covered in trans and gay pride colors. As we see each other, and he walks over, I say hello. He replies in suit, and notices my pin. Even though we’ve started to become friends, and I know that he’s nice, I can’t help but worry that I’m going to be mocked. Even still, I take a risk and hold out the pin for him to see better. He laughs at the stupid pun, looks me in the eye, and tells me that he loves it. We spend the rest of the day hanging out. We’ve been closer friends ever since.” – Tillie
