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The court system in South Carolina is an apparatus of misery and despair. The defense attorneys, the prosecutors and the judges are a cabal feeding this beastly apparatus. The department of corrections is the leash and foot on the necks of forgotten citizens. And the prisons are the dungeons used to torment the souls of newfound slaves.There is no such thing as a justice system in South Carolina, and possibly not anywhere in the entire country. The court is designed to feed the assembly line of sorrow. This well-oiled machine funnels African Americans out of society. Over sixty percent of South Carolina’s prison population is Black. Everyone in the aforementioned cabal is aware and complicit in devaluing human beings who look like me into commodities.I proved through every step of litigation possible that I am innocent of murder. Yet I’m still burdened with a life sentence without the possibility of parole because a man pulled a gun on me. The attorney who represented me was no public defender: He was paid and regarded as one of the state’s best. Unfortunately, the prosecutor on my case was on the fast track to politics. Winning my case would generate enormous publicity. In hindsight, I see that my lawyer politely conceded to further his peer’s career. I became a bargaining chip.All of this happened under the watchful eye of a judge. I was baffled. I kept wondering when this scene was going to turn in my favor, like when a character is innocent on Law & Order. Surely this judge would uphold the ideal of innocent until proven guilty. But the wrongdoing kept mounting. Witnesses lying on the stand. Evidence withheld that proved my truth. The lead detective committing perjury while looking my attorney in the face. Jurors sent notes to the judge through the bailiff citing daily intimidation, to the point the judge had to address it during the trial. I have a sworn affidavit that someone from the prosecutor’s office went into the jury room during deliberations and directed the jurors to find me guilty. On Law & Order, the defense attorney would’ve called for a mistrial.Real life isn’t TV. I was found guilty.I’d trusted that the law would uphold the sanctity of the courtroom. I still maintain my innocence. But I’m no longer naive.

There is no such thing as a justice system in South Carolina, and possibly not anywhere in the entire country.

The Tree of White America’s Indifference Bears Terrible Fruits

Fast-forward 16 years, and I am living in the age of smartphones, access to the whole world in the palm of your hand. Others use this access to keep up with the Kardashians or decode mumbly rappers. I use my window to watch the unfolding war between law enforcement and African Americans. I'm already ensnared in this net of oppression. I cannot suffer in silence. I must add my voice to the growing collective call for change.Those slain by officers of the law and ignorant racists have paid the ultimate price. They deserve the recognition due to fallen soldiers.A heavy thought keeps pounding at the door of my consciousness. All that is happening to African Americans and all that I'm experiencing are fruit from the same tree. At its root is white America’s lack of respect for Black lives. The tree growing from that root is systemic oppression, and its fruit comes in many flavors. The manager following you around the store, presuming you to be a thief. The lady clutching her purse when you walk by. The supervisor passing you over for that promotion when you're the most qualified. The state trooper pulling you over for DWB (Driving While Black). The beat cop shooting you and justifying it with his own prejudiced fear. The prosecutor throwing you away because a judge refuses to see you as a person. The system losing you altogether. And no one in power holding anyone else accountable.Publilius Syrus, an Assyrian writer of the first century BC, once wrote that “the fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.” I say watching those you love die, and not being able to console your remaining loved ones while you fear dying in prison, is the quintessence of torture.

Real life isn’t TV.

There’s a War Going on and Black Bodies Mount Upon the Battlefield

In prison, I expected secure confinement aimed at rehabilitation. I have come to find that imprisonment is legal terrorism upon citizens of this country, the most heinous dehumanization possible. There is no correction, no rehabilitation. There is only the meager existence of eating, sleeping and wallowing in despondency, awaiting the possibility of freedom. Incarceration is a snake trap: easy to enter, impossible to escape without the help of the trapper. Since I have documented evidence of the egregious violations of my constitutional rights; I will have my day in court to expose these subjugators’ actions. The larger battle I have chosen is for the freedom of all victims of prosecutorial misconduct.I am trapped and have no flight option in this war. So I must fight. And I need help! I will always contribute to my environment, so while I'm on the inside looking out, I will help uplift even this community. Yet I’m thwarted at every turn, not even allowed to raise the social awareness of less informed, and sometimes mentally ill, individuals.To anyone unsure about furthering prisoners’ causes and rights: You must understand that while many people deserve punishment for their crimes, entirely too many wrongfully convicted men, women and children are behind bars, subjected to inhumane treatment.We fight not only to reform the criminal justice system but eventually to abolish prison altogether. If a large prison population were an indicator of public safety, America would be the safest place on Earth. I pose this question mainly to people of color, but to everyone who reads my story: Do you feel safe?

From the middle of the street, I put my camera down and saw that the guns hadn’t been magnified through my lens after all. They really were as close as they seemed—far too close to feel any sense of comfort. But Hong Kong hadn’t felt comfortable for quite some time now.I moved closer, despite my partner’s pleas to be careful. He stayed back a block while I followed the crowd. From my vantage point, I could see dozens of police officers staking out high ground on the walkways overhead, their water cannons and gas canisters at the ready for the incoming wall of protestors that I had found myself at the front of.The police were suited up like it was a battle against an evenly matched opponent. They looked ready to draw blood if they had to, ready to watch unarmed people squirm in the streets after they released gas canisters deep into the crowd. They’d brought the hammer down on innocent citizens before. I’d seen them beat people senseless in the street, watched them laugh alongside the pro-China triad gremlins who chased journalists and protesters around Hong Kong with machetes. The national police had turned away from the people during all of these acts and they weren’t hiding it. In the midst of all the civil unrest, they changed the force’s official motto from “Pride and Care” to “Vow to Serve with Honor, Duty and Loyalty.” The men and women wielding the guns were no longer people of Hong Kong, but loyal, dangerous puppets of the Chinese Communist Party.Over 250,000 people marched that September Saturday afternoon. We journalists had been informed about the protest through a private WhatsApp group—it became clear that it wasn’t a secret. The people organizing it were brave just for putting the word out. To be caught at the head of this uprising was to risk being arrested and loaded onto a train headed across the Chinese border and into a black zone.There was no telling what would happen, but the marches needed to take place. The people were growing restless with China moving in, sabotaging their elections and silencing any whisper of pro-democracy discussion. The people of Hong Kong were fighting for their autonomy and organizing at tremendous risk. The youth were fighting for their futures and their lives. It only felt right to risk my own freedom and use a weapon that many of them did not have: the media.

As a Photojournalist, I Knew I Had to See the Hong Kong Protests Firsthand

Back home, I was pissed off that the Hong Kong crisis was covered as a few short segments mixed in with the world updates. People were being silenced, kidnapped and murdered for their beliefs, as day by day, their way of life was crushed by the red hand of China. I knew that people back home glossed over news stories. They skipped words to get to the pictures and videos, then made snap judgments like villainizing protestors when the demonstrations turned violent.I was tired of people not asking why. I had a camera, a good eye and a few contacts in Hong Kong, so I bought a ticket to see it for myself.I had to do something.That Saturday afternoon, I found myself at the front of the march as the mass of bodies moved onto the freeway, bringing traffic to a stall with a gentle insistence, directing oncoming cars and buses to turn around and find alternate routes. Commuters waved and smiled. A bus driver parked diagonally across the highway to block traffic. There was an energy in the air that was supportive and strangely uplifting, a camaraderie that I hadn’t expected to find—especially when the news I had seen focused so much on violence.It was unreal how determined and proud these young protestors were—as they should have been. Their words and actions grabbed people from all corners of the city, drawing people young and old from the neighborhoods and through the financial district. Old people strolled with young children. Groups of teenagers waved Hong Kong flags. Restaurants offered free food to marchers and individuals handed out water as thousands of feet moved through the city, their voices echoing up the glass walls of the skyscrapers. I found myself swept up among the people, shouting alongside them: Free Hong Kong! Five demands! Not one less!The fist I raised in the air was covered in goosebumps. The noise around me was growing louder. I realized that I couldn’t stay objective in this story. Not after all I’d heard in the after-hours at the FCC journalists’ club and in interviews with people on the street from both sides—countless stories of police officers raping women in jail who had been arrested for protesting, children in school uniform arrested while walking to school. I couldn’t stay neutral after police raided the Prince Edward subway station, gassing families on their commute home. I couldn’t be objective because there was clearly an enemy and the fight had become personal: It was an attack on truth. The CCP continued trying to suppress what was happening.I feared they were going to make Hong Kong into another Tiananmen Square.

People were being silenced, kidnapped and murdered for their beliefs, as day by day, their way of life was crushed by the red hand of China.

Protesters Were on a Collision Course With Police Violence, but They Came Prepared

I moved through the crowd with a new rage as I noticed how ordinary the people around me were. They’d been painted as villains in China’s national news and misrepresented by foreign eyes who didn’t have the whole story or were clearly biased towards China. These were the people, who just a week before, had united in protest to hold hands in a 27-mile-long human chain around the entire city. The movement felt like it was heading toward a head-on battle with a grossly overpowered force that many of us as journalists feared would win in the end. Taking photos of the everyday people marching felt more important because of it.I was going to do everything I could to get their story out there.A story told through photos, something quick and real that could be turned over and magnified to raise international support for Hong Kong. I lingered on a sign that read, “Watch us fall. You will be next.” This was a global fight that had been left in the hands of just a few to win.I pushed ahead in the crowd to look for the front-liners. I’d seen their photos in the media and in the protest’s WhatsApp group. Their trademarks were their all-black outfits and the umbrellas they used to deflect the water cannons and tear gas, and block police vans from moving into the crowds. They were vigilantes who were featured on animated posters everywhere in the city. I found them and walked, positioning by body and camera in the rapidly closing gap between democracy and oppression.The first gas canister flew over my head and landed 50 yards away. The front-liners were quick to cover it with a traffic cone and duct tape the top so that the smoke couldn't escape. My heart was racing as I watched the crowd shift. The more vulnerable marchers moved to the back, while more front-liners moved up to fortify their positions. Then more canisters came. I could hear the clink of metal against concrete and the hiss of toxic gas streaming out. My eyes began to sting behind my goggles. I lowered my camera just for a moment and felt the most exposed I’d ever felt in my entire life. My hi-vis vest, gas mask and press badge were like a huge red target painted on my back. The water cannons started up and I could hear the streams spraying hard against the pavement. The water was dyed blue so the police could identify protesters later and arrest them, pulling up in broad daylight to throw them in the backs of vans with barred windows.

I Had to Get Out of Hong Kong to Get the Story Out

I didn’t want to, but I found my feet backing up and away from the conflict. I had to—my fight was in the photos and in making sure that I didn’t get arrested before they got out. I left the front-liners and ran to find my partner. Word was coming in from other journalists that the police were surrounding the streets, trying to corral the people into their traps like mice. We followed a small group of protestors running down an alleyway who had said they knew a way out. We found the first inconspicuous place we could to strip off all of our identifying press gear. We transformed into civilians and watched from a restaurant window as the police barricaded the end of the road we had just come from. We missed the blockade by minutes.We got out, which I hadn’t expected to be such a worry when I first arrived in Hong Kong. It wasn’t that I was naive, it’s just different when a gun or a baton or a bloodstain are right in front of you—and not framed in a photograph. All of the conversations I’d had, all of the kind gestures I’d seen and received from so many people, all of the injustices that I had witnessed, all became real. But those memories would die with me if I couldn’t get my photos and their story out to the world. I had taken on the responsibility of telling the truth, which many locals had thanked me for with free food, drink and taxi rides. The kindness of the people and their love for their city was weak when stood up against the Chinese machine. It was a hard truth that all I could do was document while the CCP closed in on the freedom of press to report on the situation.I bought a ticket home and left Hong Kong the Tuesday after the march, burying my flash drive deep in my backpack and making sure my computer and camera were clean. I left carrying a hope that documenting firsthand the words and actions I witnessed could make a difference.I had tried.We all had.But we know now that it wasn’t enough.

Griot's Story: Black Families Ripped Apart by Slavery Then, and Foster Care Now

As our country continues to atone for its history of racism and misogyny, there’s one part of the narrative that continues to be left out of the conversation: foster care. As a man, I understand that there are many privileges afforded me because of my gender. And as a Black man, I’ve been given a playbook to navigate the many obstacles that have been, and will continue to be, laid before me.But there is one part of my identity that there has never had a playbook.My mother had a foster care experience as a child, so I was raised differently than my peers. Her family represented the deeply entrenched pain of generational trauma that stretches back to slavery. My mom is Creole, which means that her skin bears the physical stain of colonization’s most oppressive tool: rape.It’s no secret that in addition to whipping and hangings, slave masters used rape as a tool for control. In addition to being forced to bear their enslavers’ children, Black women were also made to breed with desirable enslaved men to create offspring that would fetch a higher price on the open market. A recent report from 23andMe highlights the brutality of this practice and its continued impact on our gene pool in the Americas.This trauma did not end with slavery. During Reconstruction, the South enacted Black codes that made it easy for former slave owners to take the children of freed men and women to work the plantations if their parents couldn’t prove they were “rightfully” employed. These are the first examples of racially motivated policies that continued to dismantle Black families and impact the Black community after slavery was abolished.Over the years, many Black families adopted the brutal practices of slave owners and beat their kids to keep them in line, as well as to prepare them for the hostile world around them. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” and, “I’m doing this to protect you,” are narratives that have been sold to black children to justify the “whoopins” their parents give them.To be clear, this is solely a byproduct of assimilation into Eurocentric culture in America. African people who weren’t colonized don’t beat their children. In fact, many indigenous African cultures believed that children were ancestors reincarnated from the spirit world, and were born with great knowledge and purpose.Surprisingly, research has shown that children of all races are equally likely to be abused or neglected. However, Black children are significantly more likely to be overrepresented in foster care. In Los Angeles, where I live, Black children represent about eight percent of the youth population, but Black children make up 30 percent of the foster care population. Sixty percent of the cases in which children are removed from their homes come from neglect, not physical or sexual abuse. The U.S. government defines neglect as “the failure of a parent or other person with responsibility for the child to provide needed food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or supervision to the degree that the child’s health, safety, and well-being are threatened with harm.” These are clearly conditions related to poverty.At the same time, Black families are twice as likely to spank their kids as white and Latinx parents. The spanking of Black children, which, again, comes directly from our enslavement, is the path by which many families are introduced to child welfare services. The type of discipline Black families believe helps save their children from an unjust fate can end up perpetuating the dismantling of Black families through foster care. Like the Black codes of the South, children are removed from their homes and handed over to new caregivers who are paid to care for them, instead of birth families that could use those resources instead.This is the world that my mom grew up in. She was physically and sexually abused, but she kept this truth from me because she didn’t want to burden me with this pain or keep me from feeling free to discover the world without fear. She never put a hand on me, and anchored our family on the truth that the cycle of abuse would end with her. This commitment to our collective healing was heroic and profound.By swallowing her suffering and denying its influence on her parenting, she reclaimed our African ancestors’ beliefs about children. She would tell my sister and me that we came through her, but were not of her. We had an infinite design that was far grander than she or we could imagine. She said as our mom she was simply responsible for keeping us safe until we could fulfill our inherent potential.A clean slate was the greatest gift that my mom could give us. Perhaps this sacrifice would change the epigenetics of my children and their grandchildren. Perhaps the scourge of slavery would be eradicated from my family’s biology, and justice would finally be ours.While driving my close friend, Ernestina, home and listening to her story, I was painfully struck by the residual effects of trauma. It’s telling because, as our country continues to atone for its history of racism and misogyny, one part of that narrative continues to be left out of the conversation: foster care.I’m snapped back into the reality of the moment by Ernestina’s story of abuse. Her pain echoes the trauma of her ancestors and pushes back against my hope that this suffering can be contained. Though she is not Black, many of her struggles for healing and justice are eerily similar.

Generations of colonial displacement and violence had hammered into my head the idea that caregivers must harm their children for fear of losing their identity or family.

Ernestina's Story: The Cultural Fabric of Our Immigrant Family Caused Its Unraveling

As a child, my parents taught me how to perform a perfect façade. I was an excellent student—creative, charismatic, happy. I was the daughter of undocumented immigrants who made the treacherous journey across borders to give their children a better life. It was a stereotypical example of good parenting and the immigrant American Dream. This pristine illusion came to an end the day four police officers showed up to our house and placed my siblings and me in foster care.I didn’t know how common my experience was until I began having conversations with other people who had been affected by the foster care system. Understanding the traumatic parallels that existed in these narratives made me question why I was displaced from my family as a child. According to the police reports, the reason for separation was excessive physical and emotional abuse, but my case felt bigger than my parents. I knew my mother loved me. She often justified the abuse as a form of protection—the only way she could ensure I was a disciplined, educated and unassuming child.I grew up believing that suffering and traumatic abuse were inherent in communities of color. Generations of colonial displacement and violence had hammered into my head the idea that caregivers must harm their children for fear of losing their identity or family. As an impoverished woman in El Salvador, my grandmother believed she needed to prepare my mother for the harsh reality of life. This lesson was taught in the form of harsh beatings, and one I had to learn for being born to poor, undocumented immigrants.While unpacking my mother’s ancestry, I began to understand how historical events directly affected us. In the 1930s, a great massacre took place in El Salvador. In a single week, the country’s military murdered over 30 thousand mostly indigenous people for protesting against oppressive regimes. Indigenous culture, including dress and language, became criminalized. During this time, my great-great-grandmothers gave their daughters away to landowners, which at the time was their only chance of survival. These families raised my great-grandmothers as child slaves. In essence, it was the first known occurrence of foster care in my lineage.In the 1980s, the United States funded and backed a civil war in El Salvador. My mother was a teenager at the time, and she had to flee her country as a refugee. Displacement, loss of culture and violence were the recurring themes in my mother’s lineage. The irony in my mother’s parenting is that her methods for trying to keep me safe ended up being the reasons the system separated us. Her story is indicative of the current refugee crisis and the unaccompanied minors crossing our borders as a result of the policies we have initiated in their countries.The similarities between my foster care experience and Griot’s are alarming and enlightening. The narrative is more complex than a single person, family or case number. Separation strains the relationships between families and culture. It encourages loss of identity and self-hatred, making it easy to blame your suffering on the very people who gave you life.From this revealing conversation, I recognize that this is the greatest crime against humanity—a quiet epidemic that robs children and families around the world from realizing their greatest potential. In America, we cannot reconcile our dream of being a global humanitarian leader until we fix or abolish our current foster care system. Right now, racial justice plays a critical role in our national discourse. That conversation also needs to recognize the maltreatment of women and children. It is time that our creed “all men are created equal” includes women and children too. The voices of foster care must no longer be silenced if we are to truly heal as a country.

Mere boastful bullshit, you say? Alas, no. I've been told that most people can just do their business, flush the flusher and walk away lighter and carefree. But my shit does not work that way. It sits there, fat and bloated and looming. It defies the flush. I stare at it. It stares at me. And then, for the millionth time, I grab the plunger and have at it—plunging only once, if fortune farts its gentle breath upon me. Often it does not.My defiant, stubborn poop has been stopping up toilets at home and abroad for as long as I can remember attempting to use toilets. It's just the way my body works—an annoying, disgusting quirk of the flesh, like snoring or the mole next to my nose. It's a pain and a joke, but not a terminal condition.Except for the fact that it kind of is.

I swallowed it all eventually, but not before bursting into tears.

My Diagnosis With Crohn's Was Tough

I figured out why my poop is so sullenly tenacious back in high school, when I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Crohn's is a condition resulting in inflammation of the digestive track. It is an extremely painful, humiliating and potentially life-threatening illness, which turns life into an endless nightmare of shit and bile and flatulence and pain. People afflicted with it often throw up everything they eat. I have numerous food allergies, so at first, we thought that was the problem and were trying to figure out what to take out of my diet. That didn't work though and I finally ended up in the hospital after the constant vomiting dehydrated me.My bout with Crohn's disease was one of the worst experiences of my life. The cramps were, literally, crippling, but the treatment and diagnosis were in some ways even worse. The thing that most sticks in my mind, like that poop in the toilet, was being given a big glass of some disgusting fluid to drink (I think to clean out my colon). It was so vile that my parents and I hit on the clever notion of diluting it, making two less vile big glasses instead of one vile one. Unfortunately, those two glasses were undrinkable too, and so we went to four. Soon it became clear that it was repulsive at any concentration, and I was left with an ocean of noxious liquid, as I got fuller and fuller and more and more bloated. It was a metastasizing, self-devised torture. I swallowed it all eventually, but not before bursting into tears.

I Get It; It Could Be Worse

Horrible as my experience with Crohn's was, though, it could have been a lot worse. Crohn's is a chronic condition; there's no real cure. People afflicted often end up on immunosuppressant drugs and restricted diets for the rest of their lives. They may need multiple operations to remove sections of their digestive tracts. Even so, they suffer with lifelong pain and may not be able to control their bowels.It's a terrible illness—and it's mostly passed me by. Apparently, my Crohn's is restricted to the very end of my colon. A round of steroids put it into remission, and after a decade or so, my doctor even stopped prescribing the sulfa drugs that I'd been using as a precaution. It hasn't recurred. I only think about it now occasionally when my shit gets stuck, and I idly remember that I poop great big powerful logs because my bowels don't work quite right.It's easy to say I'm lucky—and I certainly am lucky. But as I've learned more about disability rights movements over the last few years, I've realized that luck is not just about the end of my colon. It's also about how society does, or does not, accommodate colons that don't work.Matthew Cortland, a disability advocate with Crohn's had so much trouble getting access to treatment that he had to become a lawyer. In his words, he "needed to know how to sue health insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers just as a self-preservation thing." Cortland has also talked about the stigma that comes with the shit and vomit of being a Crohn's sufferer. It's hard to ask for accommodations when explaining your condition in itself makes you an object of pity and contempt.

I stop up toilets with my thick, coherent turds because my bowels don't work.

Society Needs to Do a Better Job Dealing With Disability

Even though my Crohn's is relatively mild, I do have some experience with the ways in which dealing with my shit is also about dealing with the shit of other people. When I was in third grade, I had what I think now was my first intimation of Crohn's—a truly terrifying bout of constipation that lasted for days (and for what felt like years)—on various toilets at home and at school. Unable to push the poop out of my malfunctioning butt, I eventually innovated. I stood up, took some toilet paper and reached around to break off the bit of poop that had already come out, letting the remainder suck back inside.This was not, as it turned out, a great idea in the long or short term. After continued discomfort, I talked to my parents, who spoke with the school nurse and eventually to my teacher. They didn't give me medication; instead, they just told me I could leave class to go to the bathroom without permission. They also told me not to pull out the poop by hand, which I guess should have been obvious. But, again, I was only eight. Kids need help—which, happily, I got. Eventually, I did poop, and life, with slightly dysfunctional bowels, went on.In third grade, my school made accommodations for my shit. In high school, it was a somewhat different story. My Crohn's still wasn't diagnosed yet and I was just starting to realize that I was very sick. Nonetheless, despite some discomfort, I took the SAT as scheduled. During a break in the test, I went to the bathroom and did the thing that I was often doing at that time, which is that I vomited, copiously and painfully. Then I went back to finish the exam. I ended up doing fine on the test, and I've sometimes told this as a story about my own resilience, which I guess it is. But it's also a story about the way the school, and high stakes testing in general, tends to fail kids with health problems or disabilities. Testing instructions were all about what you can't do and shouldn't do; I certainly don't remember anyone saying, "If you're sick during the test, or are having health problems, just stop! We'll figure out a way for you to retake it later."I'm pretty sure that if I'd told someone I had severe stomach cramps, they would have rescheduled me. But I'm not absolutely sure, even now. And, as a high schooler, I wasn't really eager to talk to a proctor about the fluids I was emitting. The disease was harder to deal with because the school, and the national testing regime, in that time before the Americans With Disabilities Act, wasn't set up to provide accommodations for people whose intestines weren't working.Of course, you might argue that most people's intestines do work right and the school couldn't really be expected to anticipate my shit. But I think my defective-but-not-that-defective body shows that disability is much more of a potential and a presence than people often think it is. Bodies work okay until they don't, and often the difference between functioning acceptably and spending your life rushing from bathroom to bathroom is a couple centimeters of busted colon. People are going to have shit you can't anticipate. Do you respond to that by letting them drown in their own feces or are you going to try to provide clean, accessible public toilets? And how does your answer change if you recognize that but for a twist of bowel, you might be the one who needs the facilities?I stop up toilets with my thick, coherent turds because my bowels don't work. But I also stop up toilets because they aren't designed to deal with people whose poop is formed by faulty bowels. Is my (natural) poop to blame, or is it the toilet design? Crohn's, like many disabilities, can be painful and horrible, but part of the painfulness and horribleness is because society refuses to think about the fact that some people's bodies are messy, and balks at making accommodations. Me having to use a plunger is hardly a major issue of social justice. But it is adjacent to shit that is.

I will never forget the first time I walked into a psychological evaluation.This evaluation wasn't over trauma I was going through or something I signed up for to figure myself out as many do in their 20s. It was because I was finally an eligible candidate to become a police officer. Thinking back, it was strange: I had dealt with anxiety my entire life, and here I was, walking into a psychologist's office for my first time because of a job application, not because insurance suddenly decided that I could pay less than a few hundred dollars for a consultation.I sat down in front of a male psychologist. He seemed nice enough. I had really only spoken to men for the many law enforcement jobs I had applied for, so it did not feel much different.I will admit, I am uniquely feminine in my looks. Although I work out daily, I am tall and rest around a thin score of 18 on those otherwise unreliable BMI charts. I love wearing winged eyeliner and letting my hair down. I even did modeling when I was in high school. But I was far removed from that part of my life as I sat in front of this psychologist, ready to tell him how I knew in my heart that I could excel as a police officer in one of the most violent cities in my state. As I spoke with him, everything seemed to be going well, until he randomly stated that I reminded him a lot of his daughter, a high school cheerleader.I was a 24-year-old woman with a bachelor's degree in criminal justice, a full-time administrative job within the judicial system, I'd worked as an intern with a local district attorney's office and was just months out from completing all of the required training needed in my state to receive a peace officer certification. Yet, I left his office that day knowing I would not be a police officer with the agency to which he reported. After he compared me to a teenage cheerleader, I knew I'd get the dreaded email thanking me for my time and wishing me the best in my future endeavors.A short few months later, however, I did get hired. I still walked into all of the phases of my application process with my hair down, winged eyeliner and a confident promise to myself that I would not change who I was to get hired at a law enforcement agency. I am thankful every single day that I found an agency that hired me for who I am.

It is also a job where humor is essential, as the world is not always kind.

Gender Roles in the Police Force Are Definitely Still a Thing

Although I envisioned many challenges related to being a female police officer, nothing in my career has been like I thought it would be.I am a vulgar individual, so being around a majority police force of men all day (or night, you know, graveyards), was not much of a shock. After all, you may have to occasionally respond to a person running around flashing their private parts at other people, or a person who hasn't been alive in maybe a few weeks. Hence, it's not really a job for a person who is easily embarrassed or sheltered.It is also a job where humor is essential, as the world is not always kind.At first, the guys did tread carefully with me. But I did not tread carefully with them, and they warmed up to me. They would often tell me that my outward appearance did not match the comments and jokes that came out of my mouth and, in fact, I think they learned quickly that I would jump into any foot chase, fight or coffee break with my brothers. In turn, they would call me to assist with matters that could use a woman's touch.There are many of those calls, as sometimes people going through the worst night of their lives want to speak to someone who has the emotional and maternal comfort that many women have to offer. I have laughed with strangers, and I have cried as I held the hand of a stranger. My brothers constantly reminded me that I was worthy, that I was an officer beyond my years and expressed that they were glad to have me as their little sister. So, if everything has gone so smoothly for me in working with a majority male police force, where are the issues?

“Should Women Be Police Officers?” Should Not Be a Question in 2020

There are a few places in which women still face significant challenges in law enforcement. Many women face hurdles within their own departments, and I am so lucky that is not part of my story: There is a whole world of unfair treatment and career paths that have been covered in the gravel of sexism. I am probably a minority, to be honest.The first challenge that I can reference, as described above, is getting hired in the first place. Another is that not every person who calls the police believes that women should be in law enforcement, which is a tough pill to swallow. First of all, it is 2020. There have been articles written on women in law enforcement about how they are less likely to use force when engaging in police work. This publication was even referenced by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service in 2005. Yet, here we still are in 2020 with older generations who harbor bias and are reluctant to hire us. People call us to respond to their emergency end up not wanting to speak with us. I'll never forget the calls that I went on where men called me less-than-polite words, one telling me I should be at home cooking for my man, another telling me that he refuses to speak with a female officer.

The Challenges of Female Police Officers Include Other Women

Another test as a woman in law enforcement is, surprisingly, other women. It is an impressive career to have as a woman, and sometimes women get territorial being the only female on their shift—or being one of only a few in a department. In my experience, women have not always been the most welcoming or guides to the newcomers down this lightly trodden path.Sometimes, the woman who has already walked that path did not have someone to guide them, and they believe that the next woman must conquer it on her own. And sometimes it's because it builds a woman up to see a newcomer fail. This is not just commonplace in the law enforcement world; it is an issue that women need to work together to understand and resolve across the board.But female officers are not the only issue.The other group of women who do not make things any easier for women in law enforcement are police wives. I understand their apprehension as they sleep alone at night while their husband spends the night working with another woman. However, for me, this eventually became a matter of my former modeling photos from social media being exchanged among the wives and communications related to the job not being permitted between my teammates and me unless it was during work hours. In the end, I have somewhat learned to accept this, but it was an emotional challenge for quite some time that did not allow me to feel that "brotherhood" that the guys felt with one another.

Being a Mother and a Police Officer Has Taught Me a Lot About Myself

The most unique challenge that I can speak to about law enforcement and being female is having children. This has been something that I have become more and more passionate in talking about, as I have had two beautiful children in a short, two-year period of my career.After dealing with infertility for nearly a year and a half, I was elated to find out that I was pregnant. I cried tears of joy, tears of fear and talked to my babies every night that they were in my belly riding as my patrol partners. My husband, who is also in law enforcement, told me that women he worked with left the street around eight weeks pregnant, while some women I knew worked until the eighth month of pregnancy. I hit about 20 weeks with both of my babies before I decided to hang up my belt and go in for light duty. I faced personal apprehensions about the perception I would give off to my brothers; I was afraid of reminding them that I was, after all, "different" from them. No matter how hard I worked, I also harbored a fear that others would think that I was leaving the street to get out of doing real police work and operating under regular hours.I was lucky to make it to around 20 weeks on patrol on graveyards with both of my babies, and I could have gone even longer with how late I started to show in pregnancy. However, there comes the point in time where the maternal instinct takes over, and the safety of your unborn child outweighs worrying about how someone else may see you in your job position. That part of being a woman that was hard for me to accept, but there is no one to blame for the fact that some of us are born with the ability to carry children. I got to watch multiple other coworkers, the kinds who don't have the equipment needed to carry children, continue to do what they loved to do on the streets, as I sat in the office doing paperwork. After dealing with infertility, I am in no way ungrateful. Still, it is an odd feeling to vulnerably sit at a desk away from the dangers of the world, while men can continue their everyday lives while awaiting the arrival of their child.

Working during a global pandemic has been one for the books.

I’ve Never Experienced Anything on Duty Like COVID-19

The job also requires that we deal with shorter-term issues. Working during a global pandemic has been one for the books.I work graveyards by choice, and there is usually some hustle and bustle during the night. When COVID-19 finally surfaced in the United States, it is almost as if the world ceased to exist. In my state, when the virus surfaced, businesses shut down and everything started closing early. The majority of people stayed home but I was four months pregnant on patrol. For me, it gave me a personal sense of comfort to know that while the entire world was panicking, I could be around to provide support to others.Before I went on light duty, my biggest worry was keeping a safe distance from others, and where I would be able to pick up a healthy bite to eat at 2 a.m. My world did not stop, and I was not at home trying to readjust to a "new norm" like everyone else was. Crime does not stop, accidents do not stop, and people needing medical assistance does not stop—not at 12 p.m., and not at 3 a.m. By the time I did decide to go on light duty, the world was still struggling to get PPE out to first responders, and the numbers were rising dramatically. It was time for me to come in and let my baby grow safely.

Law Enforcement Needs Women Now, More Than Ever

As I write this, people are wishing harm on police officers across the United States and even threatening police officers' children. I think about my unborn child that was inside of me while I worked during a global pandemic, out of obligation to respond to someone on the worst day of their life, and maybe to stop just one more person in this world from having to be labeled as a "victim" on a police report. I hope to empower my children to be a calm presence for others when the world is in shambles, even if it is just in one person's world.We need women in law enforcement but they don't often apply for the job. I have realized that while there are many obstacles involved in being a woman in law enforcement, much of the time the struggle comes from within ourselves. Nearly every challenge I have encountered stems from one place, and it is that I seem to care just a bit too much about other people's perception of my gender, and not enough about what I am capable of as a strong woman who knows what she wants in this world. They say that comes with age, and I hope to age like a fine wine.

I’m the wife and daughter of law enforcement officers (LEOs). My dad was a police officer and animal control officer before he lost his battle with cancer at 34. Nearly 20 years later, I am writing about my experiences as the wife of a LEO. I think back to the admiration and awe that I had for my dad and how I’ve since fallen for my own man in uniform. My husband and I have been together since 2016. He’s worked for two different agencies during his six years in law enforcement. What I want to emphasize here is how his heart for people—and his desire to help—is being crushed, suffocated and pushed aside due to the major political agendas that want to blame him (and LEOs like him) for society's problems instead of looking for and funding the root cause of those problems. Specifically, my husband has a deep conviction—a calling if you will—to help people in crisis. Be it a physical crisis, a mental health episode or both, he very much wants to assist people who may feel like they have nowhere else to turn. A sheriff department (I'll call them “the county”) is very different from municipal police (“the city”) forces. The main difference is that the sheriff is an elected official. The police chief of your local town or city is appointed by the elected officials. A generalization of the two breaks down like this: If you get pulled over in the city, the police officer will most likely give you a ticket. The sheriff doesn’t want his constituents mad at him, especially if it’s an election year, so the sheriff’s deputies most likely won’t give you a ticket unless you’re rude, belligerent or egregiously breaking the law.Most of what I’m about to share, my husband can’t talk about. He works at the will of the elected sheriff of a rural county and would most likely be fired for what I’m about to say. Previously, he worked for a larger city with more people, more funding and, in my opinion, worse governance. Police shouldn’t be defunded. If anything, they need more funding and better governance of how that funding is allocated.

Most of what I’m about to share, my husband can’t talk about.

We Have to Buy Our Own Basic Vital Equipment

Another big difference: The county requires that officers provide many of their own supplies, like a gun, handcuffs, boots and more. In larger agencies (like the city), most, if not all of these are provided by the department. It’s a way to make sure everyone is using the same defensive and offensive gear. When my husband went to work for the county, he was given a bulletproof vest that, according to the tag, was from the 1980s. I was stunned.Kevlar vests expire. Technology has improved in the past forty years. My husband could either buy himself a $600-plus vest or put himself in danger by wearing an old, dilapidated one not fit for duty. He wore that vest for about four months. We were newly married and strapped for cash, but his parents were thankfully kind enough to buy their son a bulletproof vest for his birthday. Why does a servant of the law have to provide their own bulletproof vest or wear one that’s 40 years old? Why aren’t funds allocated to buy basic vital equipment for all sworn officers?We also live in a right-to-work state, so unions have very little power here. That can be a good or a bad thing. I believe that unions often do more harm than good. They keep ineffective officers on the streets who need to find a different career. But that also means that my husband doesn’t have access to collective bargaining agreements that would require his job to provide basic vital equipment. It would be like asking surgeons to provide their own scalpels.

Police Departments Need to Measure Better

In the city, if a LEO doesn’t write enough tickets, that means the supervisor thinks they’re sitting around doing nothing. If you ask any cop, they will all sing from the same songsheet that there’s “no quota” for the number of tickets they have to write. But what happens is supervisors often use tickets as a benchmark for performance. In my husband's case, he would talk to people he pulled over, rather than charge them, then get reprimanded for not writing enough tickets. Sometimes people are having a rough day, sometimes they’re just being stupid, sometimes you really, really just have to go. So my husband would have to weigh: “Have I charged enough people this pay cycle to prove to the city that I’m doing my job, or should I add them to my case docket?” If he had enough, you might be lucky enough to just have a talk about why you need to slow down and get a (documented) warning. Now I’m not saying he’s a cop who never wrote tickets—you bet he did. But he didn’t write everyone a ticket. His goal was to try and find out why people were breaking minor laws and see if he could talk to them about why they need to follow them instead.

Cops Need More Training, Especially When It Comes to Mental Health

When someone calls 911, they may be at the lowest, darkest or scariest point in their lives. Add possible mental instability, alcohol or illegal drugs into the mix and a domestic disturbance, public intoxication or traffic stop can turn dangerous really quickly.According to a poll by Gallup, nearly 20 percent of Americans report using some kind of mood-altering drug almost daily.When an officer answers a call, he/she has no idea what is going through someone’s mind. My husband has personally dealt with people who were seeing things, kids who want to kill themselves, a pissed off lady waving a gun at him (she was about 80 and almost got shot) and has had to detain violent homeless men who probably had no idea what they were doing. So, in my husband's six short years, he’s realized that he needs a better understanding of mental health issues in order to help. He’s taken verbal de-escalation classes, mental health certificate courses and counseling classes just so he could be better equipped to help people. When he worked for the city, they did a lot of internal training. Every month, they had required in-service training where they would do classroom and/or physical continuing education. He would even train outside of work and the department would pay for it. Now, in the county, they have a near-zero budget for training. He doesn’t have in-service training anymore. If my husband wants to better himself, he has to take off and pay for the class himself. The only “support” of the department comes in the form of a pat on the back and a reminder not to ask for more time off because he takes off too much.Add on top of that the LEO mental health crisis. An alarming rate of current and former LEOs are committing suicide, suffer from PTSD, or have poor mental health because of the stigma related to admitting you are not okay. So my husband has decided he wants to help first responders with their mental health issues too. When there is a bad call, my husband is the one that will set up a meeting, grab some coffee and snacks, and sit everyone down to talk about what happened. It’s a tough sell, trying to get a bunch of hard and crusty officers to open up about their feelings, but somehow he does it. Wouldn’t it be nice if all LEOs were also trained in mental health first aid? My husband is, but he did it on his own time. He went the extra mile. How many people do you think are really going to do that?

Cops Need Help, Just Like Everybody Else

There are tools available to LEOs to help them deal with the myriad of situations they encounter: their patrol car, pepper spray, gun, taser, handcuffs and various resources like paramedics, trauma counselors and more professionals that take things to the next level. But when I think about LEOs and mental health, they’re like hammers: They have very blunt capabilities and limited expertise in how to deal with someone having a mental breakdown. That person needs a screwdriver, a wrench or pliers to fix their issues—not a hammer. We’ve heaped too many responsibilities onto LEOs and expect them to have the finesse to deal with sometimes delicate and tumultuous situations that they just aren’t trained to handle. Most officers have not had extended continuing education in how to help someone having a psychotic episode, so they need to call on someone else. But when an officer does call in the professional, they often are not available in a reasonable timeframe. For instance, a woman had a gun and was attempting to kill herself. The officers on the scene (my husband was not on this call) unfortunately failed this woman in several ways: They didn’t know trauma counselors were available to call, they didn’t know who to call, and when they finally did get in touch with a mental health professional, there was one person available for nine counties in the area. One person. Mental health is a huge issue in our country that doesn’t get enough attention, understanding or funding. Asking someone with a gun and pepper spray to come in and try to talk someone down from a literal ledge is not what that officer was trained to do. Police are generalists. They respond to everything but need to have resources and professionals available to them. Those resources need to be readily available, not on the scene after six or 12 hours. Are there bad cops on the streets right now? Yes. But the overwhelming majority of LEOs honestly want to help people. They want to get justice for those wronged, they want to put child molesters in jail and they want to go home to their family at the end of the day. So instead of calling to defund the police, I ask that you consider more funding for equipment, specialized training, continuing education and more support services. All officers should be trained in mental health first aid. Every county and city should have mental health first responders with the technical training in addition to their normal police force. And officer performance shouldn’t be based on the tickets they give but the support they provide.

Cancer season recently passed and as I sit here celebrating my 35 cycles around the sun, I cannot help but reflect on what I’ve learned so far about the complicated, super-racist immigration and “criminal” (in)justice system. I’ve been in and out of jails, detention centers and prisons, and the most critical lesson I’ve learned from being in those spaces is that no cage is capable of healing a human being. The personal transformation that occurs to someone on the inside is due to their resilience and their fight for dignity in a place that was built to forget them.I refuse to forget. I refuse to make other lives forgettable. This time last year, I was planning my first annual justice fundraiser at a nightclub in downtown Phoenix. I’d created it to fund the commissary needs of women inside of Perryville State Prison. At the event, the host of the nightclub not only recognized our table but stopped by to discuss the treatment of incarcerated womxn inside during Arizona’s mass incarceration crisis. It was so powerful, and it was happening at a nightclub in downtown Phoenix.This year, for our second fundraiser, I want to honor my comrade who has been in prison for over five years now—by sharing her strength and needs from inside, and to use my platform on social media to highlight the violence prisons inflict on our communities, so it can serve as a tool for popular education about criminalization and mass incarceration.My goal for these events has been to create pathways for our community to discuss mass incarceration.Incarceration is so stigmatized that even those of us who have experienced it have a hard time talking with one another about the harm that prisons inflict, particularly by separating families. Most of us have loved ones inside but they may be too far away for us to see, or we’re too ashamed, or there are simply too many financial hurdles for us to clear. These are barriers set up by those in power to make the lives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people harder.It’s important that we remember everyone deserves to live a life with dignity.

I’ve Experienced the Worst of the Prison System Firsthand

I too have been processed into Perryville, for a DUI, before I was passed on to Immigration Customs Enforcement to face deportation. I too have been funneled into prison through the immigration-to-prison pipeline. My experience led to the modern concentration camp referred to as a “tent city,” where the xenophobic former Sherriff Joe Arpaio brought back the disgraced tradition of prison chain gangs.In March of 2018, my mom and sister-in-law held my hands as they walked me into hell.Immigration activists have long reported that ICE relies on algorithms to assess a person's risk level while in custody, determining your bond amount or if you’re even eligible for release at all. The day before walking into hell, my deportation officer emailed my lawyer and told them that the system said I had to be detained again. I had already spent two of the most awful years of my life there, and those memories kept flashing through my mind. My mother looked at me. “I don’t have another two years to give them,” she cried, as she held me and prayed for strength and wisdom from the Virgencita.Spending two entire years of life in ICE custody was incredibly tough and having to prepare myself and my family to walk into the unknown again was even more difficult. Memories of an ICE box overwhelmed me. I remember asking my sister-in-law to buy me thermals and pack me warm clothes. What other choice did we have? What other choice did I have? I’ve seen ICE break into homes and hunt people down.Their only purpose is to target, incarcerate and deport. Immigration is a civil matter, but this country is now charging people with felonies for migrating in search of a better life.

What Is Crimmigration?

“Crimmigration” is the intersection where criminal law meets immigration law. We cannot talk about it without talking about criminalization, a term that encompasses the various ways in which people in positions of power label the migration, movements and actions of certain people and communities as criminal. Criminalization can involve many different aspects, including media narratives, political rhetoric and, of course, the writing, passing and enforcement of criminal laws. How does the legal system deal with non-citizens? How do we deal with these labels enforced upon us by the state? These policies historically are not created or voted on by the community that faces the brunt of their harm.This strategy is demonstrated through the everyday violent interactions that Black, indigenous and immigrant communities face daily in Arizona. We’re still feeling the harm of Arizona SB 1070, also known as the “show me your papers” law that shook the world when it was passed in 2010. SB 1070 was blatantly racist and xenophobic legislation meant to deport undocumented people by racially profiling entire communities.We are being haunted by ICE through cops. Phoenix police still have to verify the immigration status of every person they arrest. The state is still criminalizing.So, now I ask, what is criminal activity? Who is a criminal?It’s crucial that we think of the shared interest of criminalized citizens and non-citizens alike, as we are building power and relations with one another. The same right-wing politicians and fanatics that push outright racist rhetoric do so through policies and laws that associate immigrants and people with convictions to criminality. Yet it is these politicians and fanatics who are the ones caging children and families at the border just for wanting a better chance at life.We, the most impacted people, did not consent to over-policing policies, hyper-criminalization and racialized laws that have been imposed upon us. We continue to deal with police killing people with impunity, and Black lives being snuffed out merely for living at the bloody hands of blue lives.I’ll never forget getting brutally attacked by a Department of Homeland Security cop after practicing my First Amendment rights. How are police above the law when activists and protestors are seen as enemies of the state?

We’re Fighting to Create a New World for the People With the Greatest Needs

My favorite part of organizing against the state is, well, all of it.Dismantling and fighting back against labels. Organizing to defund the police and ICE. Causing an awakening for the rest of the world to witness the cruelties of state-sanctioned violence. Now the whole world is seeing the truth about the awful “peacekeepers” that are supposed to protect and serve us. This is not just about ICE and police—it's about rejecting white supremacy and transforming how we see each other. It is about unlearning the impulse to police one another.We must reject systems that don't serve those with the greatest needs in our communities: Black people, undocumented people, unsheltered people, those labeled “felons,” those who are trans and nonbinary. We are witnessing how we are actually safer without the police and ICE. We need resources that the state clearly doesn't care about fulfilling: support, food, each other. All of this is part of the new world we are creating.We didn’t break laws. Laws have broken humanity.

I had just finished a year at the University of California, Davis studying American history as an exchange student from Scotland. Though I had been to talks by the likes of Cornel West and other inspiring civil rights leaders, historians and academics, my real education was about to begin with a three-week tour of the Deep South.

It was the summer of 2016, and Barack Obama had just six months left of his presidency. Donald Trump was in the running for the Republican nomination, but the majority of America was still in its naive phase of considering his candidacy a joke. Below the surface, however, were the simmering flames that the world would later see fanned by Trump’s divisive and vitriolic hate speech. But all that was to be unveiled much later.

For that summer, I was preoccupied with getting my bearings from one Greyhound bus station to the next. Much to my parents' horror, I was forced to couch surf with random strangers during my trip due to a shortage of hostels. During my first week in the South, I turned up at the door of a young white couple in Birmingham, Alabama. Both were extremely friendly and immediately confirmed all preconceptions of Southern hospitality, which I’d long heard so much about.

They welcomed me into their home, laid out a blow-up mattress for my two-night stay and cooked a beautiful meal for us to enjoy together that evening. It was fascinating getting to know the couple who, like me, were in their early 20s but who clearly had chosen a very different path than me. While I was living my best life as a single 21-year-old touring America, they had recently married after dating in high school and excitedly informed me they were expecting a baby in a few months’ time.

The childhood sweethearts had grown up in Birmingham, lived there their entire lives and were now proud owners of a gorgeous Southern home, intending to live out their days there. They spoke lovingly of their childhoods spent in the area and the many friends with whom they’d kept in touch, laughing that one particular close friend now even works as the town’s sheriff. Then, I opened up about my interest in civil rights history, the reason that I had ventured into the South.

My real education was about to begin with a three-week tour of the Deep South.

My Hosts Had Never Learned About the Civil Rights History in Their Backyard

Upon hearing about my intentional trip, they were curious that I, a white guy from the U.K., was so fascinated by the Black freedom struggle. They seemed cautious to talk openly about their politics, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that they weren’t going to be voting for Hillary Clinton in the upcoming election that November. They were not fans of Obama, either, and seemed to belabor the point that he made everything a “race issue” and had only made racial tensions in the U.S. worse.

The husband, who worked as a construction worker, admitted that many of his older white male colleagues would make discriminatory comments about their Black co-workers behind their backs. Though extremely courteous to Southern white women, some of his older colleagues would refuse to open the door for a Black woman, he revealed.

“Their views are quite old school,” he said, before quickly adding, “I would never act like that, but things are still quite segregated down here.” Then, he continued. “When you come to think of it, it’s not been all that long since the days of Jim Crow. It was in our parents’ lifetime.”

The next morning, I expressed my interest in visiting Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, which was famously bombed in 1963 by a white supremacist, killing four African American girls. I was surprised to learn that neither the husband nor wife had ever set foot in such a historic site. But still, the pair agreed to accompany me, and we traveled the three miles downtown to get there.

The couple remained rather quiet as we toured the sacred building and listened to our guide describe the events of that fateful day. “I felt really emotional the whole way through the tour,” I said as we walked down the church steps an hour later.

“Yes, it was really touching. There was so much I didn’t know,” the wife admitted.

“I don’t really remember hearing about that at school,” her husband added. “I was just so fascinated by America’s battle for independence in my history class.”

I remarked about another site I was desperate to see while in Birmingham and was surprised that the pair suggested accompanying me again.

“Of course,” I said.

The Civil Rights Institute Exposed My Hosts’ Attitudes

We walked a minute across the road to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a modern museum that has illustrated Birmingham’s central part in the civil rights movement since opening in 1992.

The pair had been inquisitive up until the point of reaching the entrance of the building, when we were asked for a $15 entry fee. At that point, the husband made a comment under his breath, asked whether I wanted to stay (I did) and stormed back to the car with his wife trailing closely behind him. I stood there dumbstruck, realizing that his appreciation for his nation’s civil rights history had reached its limits.

I said goodbye and walked into the entrance of the museum and was greeted by a beautiful elderly Black woman wearing a badge that stated, “Nobody is born a racist.” She lovingly welcomed me, giving me some further information about the self-guided tour and directing me toward the exhibition rooms.

I walked around the quiet rooms, moved by the stories of freedom fighters in the movement who endured such terror, discrimination and violence all in the name of racial justice. I couldn’t help but think about my host’s reaction and felt disheartened that someone could have such contempt for the courage and sacrifices made by those who fought to make his country more just and fair. It hadn’t taken much to bring to the light of day his true attitudes about race, despite what he liked to think and wanted me to believe.

I was later reminded of this when I was confronted by a similar reality in my own country during the 2020 Euro championship football final. In this instance, three of England’s Black players had missed three penalty shoot-outs, which provoked a tsunami of racist hatred lying just below the surface. It was a heartbreaking but arguably not at all surprising turn of events. During my trip to Birmingham, I couldn’t have known at the time but the incident provided an insight into many white Americans’ true feelings about racial justice, which lay just below the surface, so often hidden for fear of being labeled “racist.”

I stood there dumbstruck, realizing that his appreciation for his nation’s civil rights history had reached its limits.

Racist Attitudes Still Persist Throughout the United States

All was to be revealed in November later that year when Donald Trump was elected on a campaign that made a scapegoat of the “other” and sought to return the nation to a time when white Americans, particularly men, exclusively held first-class citizenship. This, of course, would lead to the chaotic scenes of January 6th some four years later when American democracy was so blatantly in peril on the world’s stage.

My encounter with my hosts that day marked the first time I realized how precarious the notion of “racial tolerance” remained in America’s supposedly post-racial society. I had studied the research and theories of leading historians in American history, but all the textbooks and seminars in the world could never have taught me more about the true state of race relations in America or what was to come.

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.

I Knew Immediately That I Wanted to Give Birth at Home

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.

People leave my country because of the medical treatment.

Finding a Midwife to Assist With My Home Birth Was Difficult

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.But OK, I tried to trust.

I Thought I’d Have to Give Birth Without the Midwife’s Help

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.”

The midwives in the local hospital looked at me like I was a criminal.

I Never Heard From the Midwife Again

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.

I have lost count of the amount of times my straight women friends have bemoaned the bin fire that is their dating pool. They are spammed with haunted-looking dick pics. They are called fat, ugly sluts for not wanting to reciprocate with "titty pics.” Then, they are ghosted. Usually in that order.Equally as heartrending are the straight women you and I both know who have run the dating gauntlet and are now in the coveted state of being in a relationship. Unfortunately, a lot of these women are in crap relationships. These unhappy souls put hot wax on their labias, use $50 hyaluronic serums on their faces and demurely silence their own desires for intimacy that doesn't always involve penetration or for their partner to sometimes clean the toilet or to occasionally pick up their shoes from the hallway.Statistically speaking, they are likely to do this for men who:I will not go into the grim statistics on bad crimes. This essay is a place for irreverence and levity. It is easy to see why our straight lady friends are exasperated or downright fatalistic about their chances for a happy, or even just sort-of-tolerable, future with men.

I have found being in relationships with women is extremely difficult and demanding.

Relationships With Women Can Be Just as Challenging

One of the things I hear a lot from these beleaguered women is a variation on the theme of "things would be so much easier if I was a lesbian." Today, it is my sacred gay duty to disabuse you of this notion. The TL;DR of the situation is: This isn’t true at all.I have found being in relationships with women is extremely difficult and demanding. Torturous, quite frankly. And let's not forget that women can be toxic to one another, too. As a caveat, I would say that it’s true that you can expect a lot more emotional intimacy and very deep communication, but, if anything, this can be even harder than being in a relationship with a man—or at least hard in its own specific way.Queer TikTok is awash with thirst trap content of every stripe. It is a happy place to while away the hours. But don’t let it fool you; queer dating is its own unique hellscape. You probably won't get unsolicited lady-pie pics, but you will get blocked for being a Taurus or ghosted when she finds out that your birth chart has a rising moon in Scorpio. Or you will get sent a picture of the house she wants you to buy together after you have been messaging for two days. Or she will block you when you ask her if she’d like to go for a drink after you’ve been messaging for two weeks.I was once dating a woman who forbade me from calling her “mate” or “pal” when we were texting because it didn’t make her feel special enough. I also had a nice but very flat first date with a woman who, the next day, just…showed up at my house? I don’t even know how she found out where I lived. She just knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to come “play out,” which could have been charming and vintage, like a late-’90s street kid. But it wasn’t. It was creepy. You may also spend two agonizing years tip-toeing around the fact that you are madly in love with someone who you are pretty sure is madly in love with you. But neither of you want to presume since you are both sick of straight men presuming that they can hit on you, and you don't want to be creepy, and you also don't want to die of humiliation for reading the situation wrong. After all, they’re just being friendly when they hold your hand under the table and you write each other letters and never stop thinking and talking about each other.So I've heard.

People are tricky, and women are people.

Lesbian Relationships Require All Kinds of Emotional Labor

People are tricky, and women are people. Being in relationships with women involves an unreal amount of negotiation and exploration of feelings and therapeutic exchange and every flavor of emotional labor you can imagine. Even though this can be extremely rewarding, it is also extremely exhausting. And it’s not true that women are just better at that stuff; I have been with women who are manipulative, who make me feel taken for granted, who treat me poorly in front of others while claiming to care deeply about me, who breadcrumb, who ghost, etc., ad nauseam. Internalized misogyny is a bad, bad beast, but even I drew the line when a woman I was dating said, “Eww, what is that?” at some underarm stubble (not a full armpit bush). Some years later, I was going out with a woman who, like me, also dated men. We had been dating for a little while, and I introduced her to some of my friends on a chilled night out in a bar, where she proceeded to regale us all with graphic stories of how excellent she is at giving head to men and how much she prefers it. Straight women of the world: Lesbian relationships are not your panacea. If you are looking for simple, unconditional love, get a dog.

At 2 a.m., my 7-year-old son shook me gently. “Mom, I heard a noise in the kitchen.”“It’s probably one of the neighbor’s dogs,” I said and pulled back the covers. “Get in bed with me.”My 2-year-old daughter was asleep in her room. The bathroom light that I left on sent a sliver of light into the hallway. I covered my son with my quilt, and, just as I was closing my eyes, I saw a shadow intersecting the light beam. Thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me, I sat up. A black figure was moving toward me. My eyes adjusted to the dim light. I saw the outline of the knife he held in his hands and the open zipper of his pants.“Take a blanket into the living room,” he said. “Tell the boy to stay in bed.”“Stay here,” I said to my trembling child.I wanted to scream, but I knew a terrorized scream might wake my daughter. I stifled any sound, except the pounding in my chest. Heart attack. Scared to death. I could hardly breathe. Faint. And then what? Have this monster be so angry, he’d go after my kids?“Spread the blanket on the floor and lay down.”Silently, I made a “good act of contrition” to meet my god. I begged god to spare my children. When he was done, he told me to lay still. I heard the back door close. He didn’t have to tell me not to move. I was paralyzed.“Mom?”I looked up and saw my son standing in the doorway. What had he seen? He was never obedient. He saw it all.

I Never Received Any Compassion—From Law Enforcement or My Mother

The cops should have called an ambulance. A rape specialist. SVU. All of that. They didn’t. It was 1972. I waited four hours alone in the police station hallway waiting on a medical examiner. They’d called my mother to come get the kids. There was a small pile of laundry in the hall. “You couldn’t have cleaned up?” she said as she passed by the sofa where I was sitting holding my sleepy-eyed daughter. My son was at her side. As dawn was breaking, a man in his 50s led me to an examining room. “At least you had enough sense not to wash away the evidence. You’ll need a VD test. He ejaculated. Do you take the pill?”“No. I just recently got divorced.”“You’ll need to know if you’re pregnant too. Get to a doctor. Soon.”My children had medical coverage through covered welfare. I didn’t. “Alright.”Waves of nausea, anger, disgust and shame surged and ebbed as a young cop drove me home. “A sex crimes investigator will contact you. Tell the truth.” The truth was, if I was pregnant, I’d either have an illegal abortion or kill the child. And I wouldn’t have to see a doctor for a test. I’d birthed three children, one a stillborn, and if I was pregnant, I’d be throwing up by this time tomorrow.

Pregnancy as a result of rape makes it a poisoned one.

The Assault Put My Life on Hold and Beliefs Into Question

I needed a shower. His sperm was beginning to smell as bad as the vodka on his breath. My mother handed me a mop. “The dishes are done. But you need to get these floors clean. The detectives already talked to Steve,” she said. It was her way of telling me she’d changed her mind about watching my kids while I went to school. Yesterday, I’d gone to orientation at San Diego State. After years of navigating the system, Chicano EOP agreed to help a white woman with expenses.“You mean you’re actually going?” Mother had said. It meant two days a week, she would have the kids for the afternoon. “Do you think you can do the work?”At her feet was a bucket that smelled of Pine-Sol. “I’ll mop after I shower.”“I hope you don’t think this is going to bring your husband back. He doesn’t love you. Get that through your head.” My ex was already living with a girlfriend.But college would now have to wait. My spirit had been murdered. I needed someone, and there was no one to call. “Get out of my house,” I told her. “And don’t come back.” She knew I never pulled stunts. She chose to believe otherwise, to ignore reality as people always do when you’re not important to them. With the testimony of the detective assigned to the case, welfare agreed to move me into another apartment. Upstairs. Clean. Safe. Until I threw up.I phoned the OB-GYN who delivered my kids. “I need a pregnancy test. I was raped,” I told the nurse. Silence. “Are you there?”The doctor answered. “Yes. I don’t see rape victims. I’ll write you a prescription for some pills to bring on your period. Take them, and if you don’t get a period after a week, the nurse will refer you for a D&C.” The thought of being dilated and scraped brought on another wave of nausea. “You’re a Catholic too, right? I try to forget my own…experience. Do the same. I can’t tell you what to tell Jesus.”

The Case Against Pro-Life Zealots

The pain in her voice led me to the same question: What would I tell Jesus? As I gleefully bought tampons, I shelved the question with a prayer of thanks for 52 years. With the recent SCOTUS decision, however, and informed by a decade of college education, the question again demanded an answer. Not for the feminists or the pro-life zealots but for ordinary Christian women like me who firmly believed the rape and incest exception to abortion bans must become the rule for all state legislatures. To ensure that, there must be reasoned arguments that satisfy their constituents. Here are mine.Pro-life zealots maintain that all abortions are the murder of human life. To deny that abortion does, indeed, involve human biological material would be nonsense. But even though it takes two people to create the human material, only one bears the physical burden, and to force the psychological burdens of pregnancy by rape on that same person is tantamount to torture. It’s also abetting an ongoing felony.Be that as it may, there are situations where taking human life is not considered murder, like in self-defense, when we and/or others are in danger of imminent death or in war and capital punishment. “Aha!” zealots counter, “but babies are innocent, and it’s innocent life we must protect.”OK. Split hairs. Regarding rape, only half of the nascent human is innocent. Consider that the weapon of the rapist is his penis, his “gun” as it were, thrust into a vagina where he deposits millions of his bullets that attack an innocent ovum. Did my rapist intend for these bullets to engender new life? It doesn’t matter.In law, there are two forms of transferred intent. One theory asserts that if there is an underlying commission of a felony, then a succeeding felony, even if unintended, must be treated as part of the first. The second theory is that the underlying felony indicates the malice that evidences the intent to commit the second felony. In any case, we have come to understand that the result of a bad act is as bad as the act itself: Intent follows the bullet. It is much the same with court rules that say illegally obtained evidence cannot be admitted at trial, as it is the fruit of a poisonous tree. In other words, pregnancy as a result of rape makes it a poisoned one.The fact remains that since I had the right to kill the rapist after he fired the bullets to protect myself from further harm, I have the right to remedy the harm of those bullets—the guilty part of the human life within me. Would we refuse to treat a gunshot wound and tell the victim to live with a bullet lodged in his testicles for nine months and then remove the bullet himself? Any law that punishes the victim in such a manner would be deemed an injustice.

Did my rapist intend for these bullets to engender new life? It doesn’t matter.

The Right to Justice Trumps State-Imposed Virtue

The Bible is replete with references to the nature and preferences of God. For example, Isaiah 61:8 says, “For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and wrong; I will faithfully give them their recompense…” And Proverbs 21:3 counsels us that “to do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”It’s not enough to be or do right. We must be and do what is just. Our decisions regarding punishments and rewards must be reasoned and fair as well as what is moral and lawful. God never said it was going to be easy to mete out punishments or make rewards equitable. He does, however, hold certain categories of people as especially vulnerable and in need of special protection because of it: the poor, the sojourner, the fatherless and the widow.What would I tell Jesus? I qualified for special protection as a poor, unmarried woman of two fatherless children. I was innocent. I did not know my rapist. I didn’t drink or do drugs, hang out in bars, wear skimpy clothes or have boyfriends. I was a fatherless child, and, as it turned out, in spirit, a motherless one too. I was visited by the devil and impregnated with a demon.I believe my case would be compelling, not just for me but for the second victim of the rape: my son. He, too, suffered nightmares, night sweats, panic attacks and depression. I slept on the floor between his bed and my daughter’s crib, a chair braced under the doorknob, the front door triple bolted. What would I have told my child as we watched my belly swell with the devil’s child inside me? He wouldn’t be helping me choose onesies and booties this time. We both were diagnosed with PTSD. As there was no DNA bank then, the cops said the rapist would never be caught. There was never even a suspect. A thief had come in the night and stole my dignity, my safety and cruelest of all, my belief in justice. As for my mother, she went to her grave never saying what I yearned to hear: “I’m glad you lived.” It’s my private hell.My hope is that, though rare, rape pregnancy victims understand that their right to justice trumps any state-imposed virtue. They need not surrender their right to bodily integrity to any rapist, least of all to an elected official, and Christianity supports their decision to abort the devil’s spawn.

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.

Scheduling an Abortion Proved to Be More Difficult Than I Expected

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. Boy, was I wrong. 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 clinic’s safety came first.

My Medical History Meant I Had to Jump Through More Hoops to Get the Care I Needed

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.

After Another Round of Paperwork, I Was Denied Anesthesia

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.I did have another option, which was to go through the abortion without anesthetic. It was either that or wait two weeks. But I was horrifically nauseous, and every day put me further behind on my freelance and creative work. I was furious and frustrated. “What happened to ‘my body, my choice’?” I asked the nurse. I wanted my body asleep when my choice was put into practice, but I couldn’t wait two weeks. I decided to stay at the clinic and get it over with so I could finally go home. When I was wheeled into the operating room, the leading MD said the procedure wouldn’t hurt. He gave me a little pep talk while the nurses were maneuvering my legs into the humiliating gynecological position. So there I lay, splayed open, waiting for a man to remove a clump of cells from inside my uterus.As soon as he told me there would be some pressure, I knew he’d lied about the pain. Doctors always lie about the pain. It hurt. It hurt a lot. It hurt over and over again as an instrument scraped tissue from my uterus and out through my cervix. It probably hurt worse because I was already so angry, so clenched up, feeling so betrayed by Planned Parenthood, which had always been held up as the paragon of reproductive healthcare. The nurse in the room tried to get me to hold her hand, and I’m pretty sure I said, “Fuck no,” aloud and yanked my hand away.And then it was over. The nurses on the other side of the operation, the ones who gave more or less drugged-up patients heated blankets and Tylenol, were much warmer than the others had been. Maybe they needed better bedside manner on this end of things in order to support patients’ intense emotions or the post-anesthesia weepies. They noticed I was mad as well as in pain, and I told them the story, crying again. They brought over a regional manager who squatted down in front of the big easy chair I’d been put in and listened to me attentively. She was kind. They all tried to be kind. I know that. Other than talking to the call center that had given me an incorrect appointment first and misinformation second, there was nothing this regional manager could do.

Thinking back on it, I should have lied.

Despite My Poor Experience, I Don’t Regret My Abortion

For the first few days after the abortion, I repeated this story frequently. Most of the people I told were horrified because they, too, had thought that Planned Parenthood was the best, most trustworthy place you could go. For many people, it probably is. But if you have certain health conditions—it's still unclear to me how anyone is supposed to know which—it might be more complicated than that.What haunts me is the knowledge that I was still so lucky and so privileged—not only because of the access I have but because I am in my 30s and have been dealing with the medical establishment for years. I know how to advocate for myself in these settings (even if I hate doing it), and while I don’t suppress my anger as well as I’d like to, which doesn’t do me any favors, I know how to ask for clarification and follow-up steps. I kept thinking about someone a little like me who was much younger, more scared or who had more guilt than I did. What if that person hadn’t come back to get the abortion after being turned away the first time? As for me, I’m so glad I returned, so relieved that I’m not five or six months pregnant as I write this, relieved that I can try again in the future, when I’m ready.

“When was the last time you ate?” My doctor turned to my blank face and repeated with increased urgency: “When did you last eat?” Such a peculiar question, really, when you’re lying on an ultrasound table waiting to hear if the methotrexate injected into you had successfully dissolved your pregnancy. Two days before this life-changing moment, my fiance and I learned that our first pregnancy had implanted in one of my fallopian tubes. Methotrexate, if administered within the first 49 days of pregnancy, is over 90 percent effective in terminating pregnancy; cue the start of my career as an outlier. The emergency room OB-GYN stared worryingly at the ultrasound image, then turned to me and informed me that the medication had, in fact, failed to affect the embryo, which had now grown enough to rupture my fallopian tube. I was on my way to hemorrhagic shock, and 15 minutes later, I was in the operating room undergoing emergency surgery to remove my tube and the stubborn embryo.Every woman’s experience with loss is different. My mother’s eyes swam with grief for the grandchild she had prayed for as she tearfully presented me with an angel figurine representing what she saw as our baby, now in heaven. Other women shared their stories of miscarriages in the hopes of offering their sympathy and support. I did not grieve the loss of the baby because, to me, it was not a baby. It was as if the world around me was conspiring to make me feel a grief that I did not feel. I did not grieve the loss of a child; I grieved the loss of time, and my only question to the doctor was when we could try again.

After two months of genetic testing, daily blood draws, countless ultrasounds, hundreds of shots and a fruitful egg retrieval surgery, I found myself pregnant again.

When Heartbreak Interrupts Hope

“Is it in the right place?” Five months after my first emergency surgery, I found myself six weeks pregnant, lying for another tense ultrasound. To my shock, the doctor informed me that the embryo had landed in my uterus and that he could see the smallest speck of a heart beating. I nodded politely but didn’t allow myself to celebrate. I knew the road ahead was fraught with dangers and potential disappointments. At eight weeks, I allowed myself a blip of excitement and announced my pregnancy to my mother via an “I Love Grandma” mug. At nine weeks, I collected my fiance and mother and took them to my ultrasound to see the baby’s heartbeat that I had previously seen flicker with promise on the grainy black and white screen. While the ultrasound tech began the ultrasound, I even reminded my mom to take a video of her soon-to-be first grandchild’s heart thumping its first notes of a hopeful future. After a minute, the tech began to look nervous, made a quick excuse and left the room to, presumably, get the doctor. My heart dropped. My mom slowly put her camera down. A brief inspection by the doctor revealed to us that the baby’s heart had just stopped beating but that my body had not recognized the loss. I internally laughed at my presumption. I bitterly reprimanded myself for allowing so much hope, handing out grandma mugs as though I had never seen disappointment. My options were to continue to carry until my body naturally expelled the fetus, which had a list of potential dangers, or schedule a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to abort the fetus. I chose the option that offered the least risk to my physical and mental well-being and scheduled the D&C for three days later.

Our Dedication to IVF Allowed Us a Chance at Birth

“Can you save the tube?” My doctor looked at me skeptically, not wanting to dash my final hopes of an intervention-free pregnancy. For the second, and more painful, time, an embryo had attached itself to my remaining tube. This time, I was ready for the failure but ill-prepared for the blazing pain that would knock me to the floor. The doctor allowed me the medicinal treatment option that had failed me before, and I hoped with all the delusion that desperation allowed me. Two days later, my recently minted husband was riding his motorcycle from work when I found myself incapacitated on our bathroom floor. Between blinding pulses of pain, I decided my friend (and CFO of the company I worked for at the time) would be the closest and calmest option. The pain had become so acute that I could not open the front door for her. She quickly found her way in, helped me off the floor and speedily took me to the emergency room. My doctor met us there, and after looking at another disappointing black and white screen, he raced me to surgery. My last tube, and last hope, had ruptured, and I had begun to hemorrhage.Six months later, we had completed our first and successful round of IVF. After two months of genetic testing, daily blood draws, countless ultrasounds, hundreds of shots (administered by my husband) and a fruitful egg retrieval surgery, I found myself pregnant again. My anxiety was too intense to allow excitement. I was too used to complications and worse case scenarios. In the months to come, I would see more close calls and potential for grief, but eventually, our efforts would come to fruition. I went into labor on the Fourth of July, just in time for fireworks. Our beautiful, healthy baby girl was born the next morning and, for the first time in years, I allowed myself a release of excitement for the future.

Would they blame my medical mishaps on my prior choices with my body?

My Abortion History Gave Me a Sense of Freedom

I had been pregnant for almost two years, undergone three abortions and was met with acute sympathy for my unrelenting path to becoming a mother. One question swam in my thoughts every time a compassionate face offered their consolation for my plight: How would they feel if they knew I had an abortion before being ready for motherhood? Would they think I deserved this? Would they blame my medical mishaps on my prior choices with my body? I was 21 years old, attending university, when I found myself pregnant. My mother looked at me, left the room in tears and returned to say she had made an appointment with the doctor to “take care of it.” It was an option I had hoped for, but I was so lonely in my choice. There was no one to talk to, no voice of reason telling me that it was the right choice, because it was my choice. The simple truth is that society feels better about abortion when it is partnered with the suffering of women. The closer to death and the heavier the loss, the greater the approbation. Abortion has saved my life four times. It saved my life by allowing me to live it independently of unexpected responsibilities. It saved my life when my body failed me. It allowed me release. To me, abortion is about freedom.

I believed Roe v. Wade would remain part of the legal fabric of our country’s culture forever. It protected my college abortion—one of the best decisions of my life. In my view, a woman’s right to dictate what to do with her body was a permanent stance. I read the leak from the Supreme Court as nothing more than a scare tactic by political parties stirring the pot.Then, additional news landed in my inbox, flashing warnings of the impending blow to women’s healthcare.Meta Pixel lives within the code of thousands of sites (hospitals, crisis pregnancy centers, newspapers). The tracking tool responds to search keywords such as “terminate pregnancy” or “schedule abortion,” downloading information as personal as names, addresses, phone numbers and even medical alerts, a discovery found in a joint investigation by the Markup and STAT. The pixel sends the data into storage on Facebook, whether a user remains logged into the app or not, and remains for years, a startling revelation found in a joint investigation by the Markup and Reveal. And any company—or legal system—with access to the system can obtain the information.The leak and 26 states waiting to trigger abortion bans became real. As did the anti-abortion activists howling for the prosecution of anyone seeking or aiding a person seeking the procedure. I stared at my phone, laptop and computer and saw not objects of technological convenience but spy tools.And the one part of my abortion I never processed crept back over me: the fear.

Any company—or legal system—with access to the system can obtain the information.

I Had Privacy Concerns When I Got an Abortion in College

“Abortion is never acceptable under any circumstances.”My friend wasn’t shy about her stance on the topic, and neither were others in my dorm. We attended a top-ranked school for science, but we were in the middle of conservative Florida. Emotions ran high whenever the controversial topic arose in a conversation. And while social media was in its infancy in 2000, gossip circulates in insulated populations like a college campus.Roe v. Wade was legal, but the hostile environment turned me into a criminal evading detection from the moment I considered the procedure.I shoved my positive pregnancy test into a half-empty box of tissues, burying it in a trash bag of ramen cups and banana peels. I stared at the ceiling that night, waiting until my roommate started snoring before I carried the bag to the dumpster behind the building. And I threw it into the furthest corner, ensuring it would stay out of sight of anyone dumping their trash before the truck arrived in the morning.Lacking the tech smarts to hide my internet activity in those years, I avoided Google and its early search offerings. Instead, I found a corner out of sight of the library cameras to open the Yellow Pages. I huddled over the book and scribbled the first number I found on a scrap of paper torn out of a notebook. Then, I crumpled the note and pushed it to the bottom of my backpack.When I was ready to make the call, I skipped an afternoon class and waited for the dorm to empty. I circled the floor twice, listening at doors for sounds. Then, I locked my door, propping a chair under the handle on the off chance my roommate might return early. My hands shook as I dialed the number on the landline; radio speakers aimed at the door and window.Despite my right to the decision, I felt an overwhelming fear of persecution from my peers if they learned the truth. All it would take was one person and everyone would know. I was a little over a year from graduation, and I envisioned everything from potential job offers to my academic record getting torn away.I honestly believed a faceless mob of conservative feelings held that power.

The First Amendment Protects Anti-Abortionists

Before the advent of smartphones, protestors deployed analog methods to dissuade, track and humiliate patients at abortion clinics. Allowed to congregate outside, they tasked people with photographing anyone who approached or entered, capturing images of license plates entering parking lots.When I scheduled my appointment, the receptionist was blunt. “We recommend your driver stop a few blocks away. Cover the license plates. It will stop the protestors from getting their information.” She paused. “You may want to wear a hat or hood.”“This is legal, right?” I asked.Her voice was soft. “It’s legal, sweetie, but protestors look up cars and vandalize homes. We want to keep you safe.”I repeated, “This is legal,” in my head as my driver pulled the car into a deserted alley and we taped cardboard over the license plates. “This is legal” became a mantra as I pushed my hair under an old baseball cap and slid sunglasses on. I spoke, “This is legal,” aloud as protestors converged around the car, brandishing signs with human embryos and slogans such as, “I am a human life,” “I deserve to live,” and, “Abortion is murder” printed across them. Assault is illegal.But surrounding a frightened woman and waving signs in her face while screaming “murderer!” is considered a legitimate protest and protected by the First Amendment. The clinic didn’t have enough staff or volunteers to provide escorts, so I walked in alone.I held my hat tight, afraid a sign might bump the brim and knock it off, revealing enough of my face for a photo to identify me. Camera flashes blinded me through my sunglasses. It was a sick gauntlet of aggressive paparazzi.I looked back once to ensure my driver was clear of the fray. I didn’t want her to suffer because of me. Her car turned the corner as I reached the door, cardboard safely in place.I collapsed into a seat in the curtained waiting room, leaving my sunglasses on so no one could see me cry.

The clinic that performed my abortion was broken into and vandalized regularly.

Social Media Is Not Subject to HIPAA

Roe v. Wade was legal in 2000. That didn’t prevent patients and clinics from suffering abuse and persecution.The clinic that performed my abortion was broken into and vandalized regularly. They had everyone pay with a cashier’s check to prevent paper trails. A police officer escorted all of us to our drivers in the afternoon—the only time they could spare. The clinic moved twice to attempt to evade protestors.Organizations always found them.The nurses and doctors who cared for me demonstrated patience and compassion and deserved better treatment. It’s why I raised my voice among the pro-choice movement, determined to speak up on their behalf. I watched in furious disbelief as crisis pregnancy centers paid for Google ads in later years, disguising themselves as abortion resources. The religious groups stole graphics, mimicking genuine clinics and misleading women with lies.No one prosecuted them.And then, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. My fear of a faceless mob tracking everything to do with abortion returned full force. Except now, those fears were confirmed, aided and abetted by social media giants. Worse, Facebook isn’t subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Nor are popular period tracking apps many have come to rely on. Technology people felt comfortable using turned on them. Overnight, our sense of privacy disappeared, replaced by fear.I turned off my phone, closed my eyes and felt myself transported to a corner of a college library, flipping through the Yellow Pages. Except this time, for thousands, that act teetered on the precipice of criminal.

I Am Tired of Being Afraid

When I scheduled my abortion, I feared the opinions and retaliations of a nameless entity. I ran from the anger and hatred of protestors. I allowed the panic of discovery to prevent me from speaking up for my rights.Now the same fears are alive for thousands of others.Every piece of technology holds the potential to reveal someone we know and love. And anti-abortion activists lie in wait to enact judgment.Despite having a legal right to my procedure, I allowed protestors to make me feel small, scared and criminal. And I regret the power that panic took from me.It makes me wonder how far we—as a sex, as a society—are willing to allow ourselves to fall before making a stand.Fear is a powerful emotion; it can debilitate or motivate. I hope this is a step toward motivation. Because I’m not willing to stay afraid any longer. It’s time to start talking.

The sun was too bright that morning, the sky a painful, piercing blue. A nurse in pale green scrubs was arranging tools on a metal tray, the clatter of steel instruments shattering the awkward silence between us. Moments later, a small woman with deep-set brown eyes and a tan complexion entered the sterile room."Good morning," she said in a thick accent I couldn't place. "I'm Dr. Srini, and I'll be performing your procedure today. How are you feeling?""Please, let's just get it over with," I mumbled, squeezing my eyes shut against the threat of tears.Gripping the thin sheet that covered my waist, I tried to concentrate on the photo of yellow butterflies above me, but all I could hear was the mockingbird outside screeching at predators that circled her nest.

My Boyfriend Became a Volatile Presence in My Life

I met Joey at a punk bar during my senior year of college in the early 1980s. He reminded me of Emily Bronte's Heathcliff, a lone wolf with dark, brooding eyes and raven-colored hair. I admired his multiple piercings, and he loved my fuchsia hair. We did a few lines of coke in a corner booth before he spun me out on the dance floor, the mirrored ball above us casting rainbow prisms across his sharp cheekbones. When we kissed, I tasted the bitter nicotine on his tongue and pulled him closer. Hours later, after popping Lemmon 714s and drinking vodka shots, I followed him home without hesitation. The red flags were everywhere in the early stages of our relationship, but I ignored them, confident that I could fix my moody Heathcliff. He was jealous and quick-tempered at times, but he got along well with my friends, was close to his older siblings, had a great job at the local hospital and adored animals—all characteristics that led me to believe he was a good man with a lot of potential. However, a few months into our relationship, he lost his job and took a few months off to "get his head together." When his rusty Volkswagen broke down, he let it decay in his parents’ driveway and used my car instead, driving me back and forth to work. I didn't mind it at first—we were having fun setting up house together in our tiny downtown apartment. But he started being routinely late to pick me up from work, and once home, I'd find dirty dishes sitting in the sink and overflowing ashtrays throughout the apartment. He was usually drunk or high by dinnertime and made excuses for the dirty laundry that littered our bedroom floor. The first time he shoved me against the wall was after our fight over his unemployment. He blamed his temper on the cheap whiskey he drank that day after getting fired from yet another job. It was easier to believe him than face the truth, so I let the incident slide on his promise that it would never happen again. And it didn't, at least for a while.His temper escalated whenever he drank; if someone cut him off on the road, he'd jump out of our car at the next stop light and scream at the other driver. One time, he kicked another’s car door with the heel of his boot and left a dent. If men smiled at me in the bars we frequented, Joey got in their faces and threatened to punch them. He didn't hit me, but at home, he smashed glasses, punched walls and knocked over furniture whenever he was angry. Experience taught me how to defuse the situation by promising him that I still loved him and would never leave, but deep down, I was frightened and wondered if we had a future.

There was no way I could bring a child into the world with an emotionally unstable partner and the financial burdens we faced.

I Made the Difficult Decision to Get an Abortion

Six months into our relationship, my period was late. I knew I couldn't keep the baby when I saw the blue lines on the test stick. Thanks to Roe v. Wade, which had come into effect 10 years earlier, I had a choice. There was no way I could bring a child into the world with an emotionally unstable partner and the financial burdens we faced. The timing was terrible, and I felt there was no other way out but an abortion. Joey wanted to take that choice away from me, insisting we keep the baby. He accused me of ignoring his rights as the father and became enraged. He shouted and wept and begged me to reconsider. I assured him we could have another baby when the timing was better and somehow, this seemed to quell his temper. It was a two-hour drive to the clinic in the city, and the sun was just rising over the hill like a ball of fire. I tried to sleep, but I thought of the life growing inside me every time I closed my eyes. Even though I was only eight weeks pregnant, I knew I was carrying a girl.When we pulled into the parking lot, I started to have second thoughts when I saw a handful of protesters standing outside the gate. They carried signs claiming that abortion was murder and held up photos of dead fetuses. My ultraconservative family would have agreed with them and done anything to prevent me from having an abortion. But after a few deep breaths to gather my courage, I entered the clinic amid the shouts from protesters. The waiting room was decorated in warm, earthy tones with comfy couches and potted plants in macrame holders. End tables were stacked with celebrity and parenting magazines. A coffee pot gurgled next to stacks of styrofoam cups in one corner. I glanced around the room—there were women of all ages, ranging from young teens to women in their 30s. Some were accompanied by men who looked wide-eyed and nervous; others looked annoyed and impatient. Above one couch was the poster of a baby's developmental stages. I glanced at the drawing of an 8-week-old fetus and quickly turned away, my stomach in knots. Another picture depicted a pregnant woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, the caption warning about the dangers of smoking during pregnancy. When a nurse called my name, Joey grabbed my hand. "Please don't do this," he said tearfully, but I pulled away, assuring him everything would be fine, even though I felt like I was heading for the electric chair.

The Day of the Abortion Was Devastating

I was ushered into a small office for a brief counseling session with a psychologist who wanted to ensure I was emotionally prepared for the procedure. I pasted on a smile, told her I was OK with it and promised there would be no regrets, but they were empty words to mask the fear and guilt eating away at me. After the session, a nurse pricked my finger for a blood test and handed me a plastic cup to collect my urine for one last test. I was then seated in a small, dark room with several other women in identical hospital gowns and paper slippers. We watched a film about the abortion process that included diagrams of the procedure. Bile rose like bitter ashes in my throat as I fought to keep from vomiting. When it was my turn, another nurse led me to a small, stark room where classical music played softly in the background. I recognized Bach's “Prelude in C Major,” one of my father's favorites. Tremors took hold of me as I gripped the arm of the counselor sitting beside me. I heard what sounded like a vacuum starting up and then felt a tugging in my uterus as if my insides were being sucked out of my body. Flooded with sudden regret, I wanted to stop the horrible machine from obliterating the life inside me but knew it was too late. Tears ran down my face as the vision of a little girl appeared before me. She had thick black hair similar to Joey's and dark, feathery brows like angel wings above her deep brown eyes. She was the child I had just aborted. The machine finally stopped, but the vision remained, and I knew the girl's face was one I'd never forget. Joey was anxiously waiting in the reception room, his eyes red-rimmed from crying. We walked in silence until we reached the car. He started to ask how I was, but his words dissolved into tears. I leaned against him and sobbed for what seemed like hours before we left the parking lot.

I wanted to stop the horrible machine from obliterating the life inside me but knew it was too late.

My Boyfriend Struggled to Accept My Decision to Leave Him

My physical recovery was quick—I was back at work the next day, but emotionally, I felt the loss like a deep hole that threatened to swallow me in its dark embrace. Joey was home less and less, which I was grateful for. He had become more sullen and distant and often shot accusatory glances my way. The few conversations we had were peppered with insults—he accused me of being cruel, reckless and ruining his life. Most nights, he came home coked-up or drunk and would usually pass out on the couch. When I finally confronted Joey about his drinking and drug use, he yelled that it was all my fault, that I drove him to madness after killing our baby. He then snatched my car keys and ran outside. I chased him to the parking lot and tried to grab the keys from him, but he balled his hand up into a fist and punched me. I fell backward on the hard asphalt, shattering my elbow. Joey hesitated for a moment before hopping into my car and speeding out of the lot. A friend drove me to the hospital to get patched up, and when I returned later that night, Joey was there, full of apologies and promises that it would never happen again. But I knew better this time and asked him to leave. Refusing, he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and locked himself in the bathroom, where he threatened to kill himself. Finally, the police came, and hours later, Joey allowed himself to be committed to a psychiatric hospital at the urging of his parents. I packed up my belongings and, within a week, moved to another city where my parents lived. After that, I had to put as much space as possible between myself and Joey. There were still a lot of stigmas surrounding abortions in the ’80s, and shame prevented me from telling anyone what I had done, including my parents. I knew I needed to move on from it, but I felt as if I'd given away a piece of my soul, the guilt eroding whatever peace I had hoped to find. It was this vulnerability that Joey preyed upon. After he was released from the hospital, he tracked me down and followed me back to my hometown. Like many abusers, he told me he'd changed, that he had forgiven me for the abortion and asked for a second chance. But when I told him it was over between us, he told me I was going to hell for murdering our baby. He then stormed outside to the courtyard of my workplace and shouted to the world that I was a baby killer. And it didn't stop there. Joey did the same thing at a shopping center days later when I stopped for a haircut at the salon. I begged him to stop, but he refused unless I agreed to move back home with him. I explained that he needed to move on and put the past behind him, but my attitude only added lighter fluid to the flame. Joey followed me to my parents’ home that day and stood in the driveway, where he yelled, "You're a murderer! You killed our baby!" My mother heard him and looked at me questioningly. Strangely, it was a relief to be able to confide in someone else, but I saw the hurt in her eyes when she told me I should have come to her earlier. Although she was stung by my decision to end the tiny life that had been growing inside me, she understood my reasons and supported me with love. Joey finally left me alone when he realized I was never coming back. Despite his violent temper, a small part of me understood his grief since I had stolen his dream of starting a family together. For that reason, I could forgive him and accept some of the blame for our toxic relationship. The day he hopped on his motorcycle and left town for good, I was able to start healing.

I’m Grateful I Had a Choice to Have an Abortion

It’s been over 40 years since my abortion, and with the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, my heart hurts for the women who no longer have the freedom of choice that I did. If I'd gone through with the pregnancy, I would've been tethered to Joey and his violent nature forever. Fortunately, I was given a choice, although there is still a shadow of guilt that lives inside me.In my mid-20s, I met an exceptional man who was gentle, loving and compassionate. We have several adult children and grandchildren who I love deeply and cannot imagine a life without. But every January, the month my first baby would have been born, I still think of the dark-haired little girl with wispy eyebrows and deep brown eyes. I hope she forgives me for not bringing her into the world, but I know I made the right decision. It’s a choice that I'm grateful I had the freedom to make.

As my husband faced a possible deportation, I found myself pregnant with my second child. Quickly, I had to choose whether to be a single mother of one or a single mother of two. I had a daughter, and I didn’t want to raise her in my husband’s homeland of Syria (a good thing, in retrospect, because he was deported and war broke out there three years later). Yes, sometimes these executive decisions—ones that go against the flow—are for a woman alone to make.I looked in the mirror, pulled down the bottom lid of one eye and looked with the other eye to see if one of the vessels forked into three separate branches. At the moment of conception, the vessels are signaled by hormones to prepare for increased blood volume to nourish the babe in the uterus. I knew I had conceived. I learned this method from my acupuncture training, and I’ve monitored this for years, so I know what my eyes usually look like. I had even taken baseline photos to compare. I knew within 24 hours after sex if conception took place. I knew before the egg had even passed the fallopian tubes or embedded in the uterus. I gained this knowledge two weeks before a pregnancy test could tell me so.Early detection of pregnancy is the key aspect of safe passage. Having been pregnant before, I recognized the eerie calm of my mind and I was content to watch the wind through the grass for hours at a time. I had decided that I didn’t want to have this second child alone. I chewed on wild carrot seeds (Queen Anne’s lace, common name) that I picked from the side of the road, making sure the stem was fuzzy, and avoiding any plants that had purple spots on the stem, for they are poison hemlock. Wild carrot seeds irritate the inside of the womb, and my body expelled a slippery mucosal lining that carried the fertilized zygote with it. There was no pain, no danger. It was actually a pleasing sensation, just very juicy down there. I remember thinking that if these seeds actually worked, I wouldn’t be beholden to my body and could direct the course of my own future.Psychologically, waiting the 10 days to verify a negative pregnancy test was torture. Did this gentle experience actually accomplish the deed? The expulsion was so completely non-eventful that I wondered if anything had happened at all. I was constantly questioning if I still felt pregnant and would have indulged in that reality too. I gave myself whiplash, fighting my body's desire. My period wouldn’t come for another six weeks. Two weeks after eating those seeds, the pregnancy test was negative, and I had the oddest feeling, like not all of me was there. I always had to check for something that I had left behind any time I changed rooms or left the house. I felt like I was in a Doctor Who episode—I had changed one thing in the continuum of time, where everything felt familiar but always slightly off, something that I could never put my finger on. I believed that I had taken my herbs consciously and felt aligned with my decision, but my body hungered for this pregnancy. Nine months later, I weighed as much as I had if I had gone full term. All executive decisions really do cost.

I had the oddest feeling, like not all of me was there.

When Elbow Pain Means More Than Elbow Pain

After two years at home with my first baby, I started to work at an existing acupuncture practice, where the patients were new to me. On my first day, a woman in her 40s came into the treatment room asking for acupuncture for her tennis elbow. Over thousands of years, acupuncturists have developed the intricate art of qualitative pulse-taking—each treatment begins with hands on the pulse, a glance at the tongue and the pulling down of the eyes to collect significant data, even when treating just an elbow. The elbow is attached to a human being, and in this case, to a pregnant woman. “Are you sure you are here for me to treat your elbow?” I asked. “Because from what I see here, you are pregnant.” “How dare you! I just found out myself; you weren’t supposed to know that,” she said as she recovered. “That is private information. My husband doesn’t even know yet! I almost have kids ready to go to college. This has really caught me off guard.” “I only bring this up because certain acupuncture points are contraindicated during pregnancy because a point can pull downward in a forceful way to cause a miscarriage,” I said, committed to my due diligence in informing the patient of the potentialities of treatment at this time. By the look in her eyes, she had seen opportunity in what I had said. Her mind cranking away, I broke the silence. “Why don’t we put off the elbow for today and take the time to decide this with your husband? I will be happy to treat it tomorrow if you like.” The next day, they came in and made their decision. Within four daily treatments, her period came. She was no longer pregnant.

Women Who Have Had Abortions Must Find Compassion for Themselves

I’ve had patients with uterine fibroids and gynecological problems years after an abortion. Often, having an abortion is a private matter, a decision that is made alone when we are young or in precarious relationships and when our skills or needs for handling our emotional world are taxed, and we just carry on and carry the pain for decades. Women who have had abortions make up a club that nurses a parallel universe, maintaining a second timeline that no longer exists, a world where they cared for that unborn child. We get the procedure and run our lives, business as usual, but our subconscious knows and honors the ages of our unborn children. As resolute as we are about the decision we make, grief gets its due. But grief without acknowledgment leads to long-term physical ailments that collect without getting addressed. The first step is to find the wound that reveals the cure—often, it’s the story we harbor around having an abortion that needs attending. In retrospect, unpacking that story, nursing your own child within who had to make such a decision, is where the healing begins. Becoming your own good parent and listening to the lost part of yourself, awakening compassion in place of judgment, can reopen the river of the internal world to flow versus collecting fragments of unprocessed bullshit that haunt a future. Coming to a place of forgiveness makes one ready to lay the baby lost to rest.I bring these women together to tell their stories to one another; they all know the ages of their unborn children decades later. I then have women pick or buy white flowers and have them tie them to a rock. We meet at a dock in the morning with a rented boat to sail out from the coast. We go until there is no land in sight—each woman, one at a time, gets on the dinghy with me to privately release her flower-bundled rock into the sea. A thunk rips to the core of how real that decision was to her soul’s record. The wound reveals this cure, and finally, she arrives in the current timeline.

There was no pain, no danger.

Fertility Should Be a Gift and Not a Sentence

In my 20s, when I first attended acupuncture school, I found myself in a circle of midwives and home-birthing moms. When it was my turn to speak, I exclaimed, “I am in the wrong place! I left my boyfriend in New York so I wouldn’t get pregnant, and now I find myself with midwives!” Behind this defensiveness, unexpected grief was harking. I was crying without knowing why, but what came forth was that I was trained to be a warrior against fertility—the activist, battling something so intrinsic to being a woman. That day, fertility became a gift, not a sentence. That evening around the circle, the midwife brought out a lipstick-sized microscope to view our own cervical fluids or saliva. She gave us each one. We would spit on the twist-off round glass and let it sit to dry so we could examine our fluids under magnification. We learned that the fluids look globular and indistinct during the infertile times of the month. During the fertile times, the saliva and cervical mucus had crystalline, snowflake-like patterns. We would call this “ferning,” indicating the woman was in her fertile window. With this foreknowledge, we could navigate our fertile times consciously to become pregnant or to avoid pregnancy. What if you could know when to have sex and avoid conception? What if you could tell within 24 hours of having sex if you had conceived? What if you trusted that knowledge well enough to navigate your own reproductive life without tricking your own system with the use of pharmaceuticals? What if you could help your own body to miscarry before a pregnancy test could indicate that you were pregnant? What if you could slime the fertilized egg out before it embeds itself in your uterine lining? If you were in charge of your pregnancy, reproduction decisions would fly under the radar of the courts and medical intervention.

The riot was minor, over before it even started. The correctional emergency response team had been in the dorm and put many of the participants’ chests on the concrete before any real harm could be done. Adding to the misery of the beatings, the men caught outside their cells were unable to rest their heads on the floor—broken toilets had flooded the dorm with three inches of water.Locked down inside my bottom-range cell, I had rescued my clothes, books and legal papers from the lowest locker shelf before the water could reach that high. Watching the filth wash in through the door, I resolved that finding a cell on the top range was my next priority. A few days later, when the punishment lockdown was ended, my bunkie and I paid Kenny a pack of tobacco to scrub out the cell while we sat in on a card game, gambling in the common area. Kenny was one of those unfortunate types of which the world has many. Being young, pale, redheaded and mentally challenged did not make him special. Being convicted of arson and sentenced to 20 years as a teenager did. There are no breaks given on an arson charge. Kenny would serve every day of that sentence in the worst place on Earth as best he could. Before I had ever met him, he had survived being an abused child in prison. Now, a step up the ladder, he was a sock washer, a do-boy available for any job for a couple bucks. But he had gained an internal radar that warned him of who were the most dangerous of his fellow prisoners. Most of the time. In my quest to improve my real estate situation, I was overheard on the upper range asking Bird if anyone was short (due to be released soon), thus freeing up a bunk. “This bunk is available,” Bird’s cellmate, DD, offered. “If you can get me in the cell with Kenny." "I might be able to do that,” I replied. “You'll cover reasonable costs?”Soon, it was agreed.

But for a $20 bill, we made it happen. I bought a human being.

I Began to Make a Life-Changing Trade for $20

I was new to prison. Having turned 26 in a rural county jail with a fresh life sentence at the end of an outlaw biker lifestyle, my two years in the prison system were still part of a learning period. It was the beginning of 1991, and the only homosexuals I knew were the obvious, the flamboyant and the dying. That someone could be gay and not be one of those three was beyond me. So when DD stated his terms, I assumed he just wanted the do-boy housekeeper.Kenny shared a cell with my bunkie's friend, Li’l Rick. The value of anything is how badly the buyer wants it, and if Li’l Rick thought I wanted this badly, it would cost a lot. The next time Li’l Rick visited, I suggested, "You and bunkie here are pretty tight; why don't you and I just swap cells?"He looked at me a little questionably from the side of his eyes and grinned.“You want to be Kenny's bunkie?”“I could stand it,” I said. “The better side of this is that during lockdowns, you two wouldn't have to stop these marathon chess matches.”“Nah, you just want my do-boy.”But for a $20 bill, we made it happen. I bought a human being. "It's a deal," I said. "You talk the officer into approving the trade, and I'll give you the money when the move order comes."Two days later, during count time, the dorm officer told me to pack up and go to cell 112. I passed Li’l Rick the $20 as we met each other while moving.

Prison Will Exploit Any Weakness or Vulnerability You Have

Kenny was hyper-ecstatic when he saw his bunkie and me trading cells. I'd spoken to Kenny in the past—never in-depth conversations because I was living out the habits of having been an outlaw biker since age 15, and he was a chain gang do-boy, lifestyles very far apart in the pecking order of prison life. Moving into his cell could have only been good for his quality of life. Or so he must have believed based on his ten years of chain gang experience.A few hours later, we were locked behind the door together for the night, and Kenny wasted no time sharing his life story, spilling it out with childlike unawareness of my lack of interest. He reclined on the corner toilet as if an easy chair, telling the tale of a preadolescent orphan bounced from home to home who set fires to remind himself of the last moments spent with a sister and parents. He had intended to join them by dying in his last foster home before he passed out on the living room couch, watching the flames. Firefighters saved his life. Doctors dressed his burned body. A judge sent him to prison. Did I have any laundry he could do for a couple of ramen soups? I'd get a price break because we were cellies now.I listened in silence to his sad story. I'd heard many others. Prisons are libraries of such stories if one attends with open ears and eyes. Prison tales can break soft hearts—but time in prison can also soften hard ones. Fresh water and electricity do not make a civil society. Prison is the Wild West without freedom or guns. It’s Darwinism off the theoretical page, wondering how many of your worldly possessions it can take away and how much of your food it can eat before the fight. You weigh the pros and cons of the effort, much as a cat eyes a rat. Any weakness revealed will be exploited, be sure of that. If you believe otherwise, you will die wondering where the assistance of humanity went during your time of need. Better here to be thought a sociopath than revealed to have a heart.

Prison tales can break soft hearts—but time in prison can also soften hard ones.

I Traded a Human Being for My Own Comfort

If I allowed Kenny's pitiful circumstances to be an excuse to not make the trade with DD, it would have been damaging to my image. It would have cracked my persona as an uncaring biker lifer. Then, it would begin the erosion of the wall I hid behind. I approached the officer the next day, faking anger at being forced to live with this punk. After a bit of back-and-forth involving race and rights and seniority, I was told if I could find someone who was willing to trade bunks, the officer would approve it. Kenny watched me pack, quieter now. "I wish it wasn't DD," he said at one point, but then, he fell silent again, staring at the floor, his head bowed with the weight of options I hoped I never faced.DD and I traded cells when the noon count cleared. In my new locker on the top range, he had left behind $30 worth of commissary items as the monetary repayment for trading a human being for comfort. The next morning, I was drinking coffee with my new celly, Bird, when Webb, tapping on the doorframe, entered the cell with the news.During the night, an officer had discovered Kenny with his hands tied together to the post of the bunk bed and DD in the act of anally raping him. Both had been taken away before lockdown ended at 5 a.m. and were now in segregation, awaiting the day shift to sort it all out. I won’t say we were shocked—it’s hard to shock men such as us, but we were both angered at the subterfuge of it all. In a moment of anger, I remembered an old adage: “When one points a finger, three fingers point back at him.” My anger soon turned inward. Other prisoners would learn about all this, and I could either claim to be a dupe or own my intent and allow my reputation to include the label “sex slave trader.”I chose to own it. And I chose to make sure to remember; I had not suffered from DD’s action as much as Kenny suffered from mine. Now my heart still aches for each of my actions that can't be undone.

My mother let out a sigh. I’ll never forget the day she showed me my grandfather’s real family tree. Her voice was tinged with pain and shame—although not totally her own—that she had carried for over 30 years of my life. I don’t remember the exact words exchanged, as I was a bit shocked and enthralled upon learning who my grandfather really was. While he had passed a couple years before, I had recently taken a DNA test from a popular genealogy website. Apparently, my mother had been entrusted never to tell anyone, but you can’t really argue with DNA. My grandfather’s dad—my great-grandfather—had long been relegated to a “he-who-must-not-be-named” category in the family. I later learned that it was because if his real name were to be revealed, it would in turn reveal my grandfather’s ethnicity. I had been told that my grandfather’s darker features were due to him being “Black Irish,” not half-Mexican like he truly was.Upon learning this, I embarked upon more research and discovered that my great-grandfather had immigrated from Mexico and met and married my Irish American great-grandmother. Sometime during my grandfather’s early childhood, however, he disappeared. Though I don’t know all the details, this was likely a key event that led to my grandfather’s extremely traumatic upbringing, in which he endured poverty, child labor and discrimination. He’d also been poisoned by a relative and eventually became orphaned as a teenager. Having little opportunity, he joined the army and was sent off to Japan right after the atom bombs were dropped. He spoke openly about all of this. But I discovered later, through the same genealogy website, that he had amended his birth certificate, anglicizing his first name and changing his last, which had been the same as his dad’s. This, I believed, allowed him to “pass” in a sense and avoid any more discrimination and abuse that darker-skinned people couldn’t.Still, I wish I would have known. I could have explored that side of my family and felt a part of a rich culture and community, as I often felt alone and ostracized by many others. I had admired my grandfather for enduring all he had while still managing to be a good person, grandparent and surrogate parent when my father wasn’t able. Why couldn’t he have viewed it as a source of pride and that it didn’t stop him from surviving, like the other obstacles he faced? When I finally came clean (thanks to therapy) about an incident I had kept to myself involving my own father, my grandfather even asked, “Why didn’t you tell anyone about this?” Like his dark features, it was something that should have been obvious all along, only it couldn’t be proven via tests or certificates.

My family was so dysfunctional that it was next to impossible to deny anything, but they still tried.

My Dysfunctional Family Always Denied Parts of Our Lives

While shame and trauma can be insidious, I’ve read and learned that it can be healed with the help of empathy. But what if your family doesn’t have much empathy? Those who lack empathy are often narcissistic and abusive. To them, image is everything, so they can’t admit to problems for fear of looking bad. This creates profound denial, which in turn leads to a refusal of help that makes things worse.My family was so dysfunctional that it was next to impossible to deny anything, but they still tried. My mother couldn’t deny the cancer that almost killed her, and we couldn’t deny my youngest sibling’s rare neurological disorder that almost killed her too. We also couldn’t deny my parent’s divorce or that the police had been called several times due to violent fights. But we could flat out lie about being Hispanic and even talk badly about Hispanic people, othering them and comparing them to our WASP-y selves like we were better—not violent, low class or messed up. Yet we were worse than so many.My youngest sibling’s school called Child Protective Services and placed a restraining order on my father, who was mentally ill and addicted to prescription pills. No one wanted to discuss this in-depth or do much because it was “embarrassing.” But no one sought to have the records changed or claimed it never happened. My mother said she was unable to get sole custody of us because it was too hard, even though a lot of my father’s behavior was dangerous.In separate but no less disturbing incidents, he had driven like a maniac at my youngest sibling’s school, tickled them inappropriately in public and put a gun to his head in front of us. But that was just what the authorities had found out about. There was also the time when, during one of many violent rages, he had picked up the same sibling as a toddler and shook them. Another time, he played Russian roulette with my other sibling when drunk. And when I was 13, he threatened to kill random people in front of me, and I spent the evening in a panic, talking him out of it. Then there were times he would break through bathroom doors that my siblings and I hid behind, screaming and cursing, his eyes black, making the scene from The Shining look tame. When I was 6 years old, he had fondled me while we wrestled. I always figured this was an accident, despite feeling very violated. But then, I considered the comments he made to me. When he died, I wasn’t prepared for what we found: an arsenal of weapons, all loaded. This was a whole new level of trauma given his threats and the fact he had been trained as a sniper in the military. It was a miracle he never killed anyone. And sadly, these aren’t even half of the awful things that my siblings and I endured. When I admitted to them and my mother that he had sexually abused me overtly as a kid—and that I didn’t understand it until years later—I was accused of lying. When I brought up the other incidents, they said they had “forgotten” or that I needed to move on. That I didn’t appreciate the good. And yes, there were a lot of good times and good things my parents did. But I feel telling the whole truth is important—like the fact that I showed physical and emotional signs of having been molested that were glossed over and dismissed.

It was a miracle he never killed anyone.

I’m Telling a Truth That My Family Won’t

Every time I attempt to embrace or celebrate my Mexican heritage—whether speaking about it or trying to find out more—I am given stern looks, reprimands or elusive answers. When I traveled to the same Mexican city my great-grandfather came from, my family said nothing. I was even told many times not to date outside my “culture.” But the thing is, my great-grandfather was the most recent immigrant from my family, and I’m more connected to Mexico, more than the rest of the countries that make up my family tree. It’s important that I don’t cover up my grandfather’s heritage, as it is partly mine. While I realize I have more privilege than he did, partially because of the sacrifices he made, I will not view it as a source of shame with the same type of scorn as child abuse, because it isn’t even in the same ballpark. My family wanted to pretend that we were the perfect WASP suburbanites behind a veneer of a white picket fence. The fact is, we came from a more blue-collar area and only moved after finding a deal on a house. My ancestry could have been a source of pride and belonging, which I could have used to connect with others like me. I could have felt like I was protected or had some camaraderie with the horrors I endured. But I am here now, telling the truth because my relatives didn’t. I’m not ashamed that I’m a survivor and part Chicana. In fact, I think it’s pretty cool.

There is a school of thought that says bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it was once known, is caused by childhood trauma. I believe this, based on my own childhood experiences. I could fill several books with tales of my life living with this disorder, but I will precis many of the events by concentrating on one or two.I was the second of two children born to an army officer and the daughter of a banker at RAF St Athan, Glamorgan, Wales. I had a brother who had been brain damaged at birth and was one month short of 11 years older than me. Not long after I was born, he was sent to a public school in Wales by my grandfather on my mother’s side so he could keep a watchful eye on his progress. I, on the other hand, went with my parents to Hamm, Germany. We lived there for a little over three years before returning briefly to my grandparent’s house in Cardiff until my father was posted out to Cyprus. He did further tours of Germany, Aden and Germany again before he was posted back to England when I was almost 11.

Had anyone cared to look, they would have seen the early stages of mania.

I Grew Up in a Culture of Abuse

There was a culture of heavy drinking in the armed forces in the 1950s and ’60s. When drunk, my father’s mood could often change from good to bad very quickly, and my mother and I were often the brunts of these outbursts. This could be anything from a slap to a punch (and on two occasions, a kicking) as I lay curled up on the floor. One of my earliest memories was being hit and falling into a wall when no more than 3 years old. My mother also drank, and they would often have drunken arguments that lead to violent outbursts. I lived in fear of my father’s drinking, and I would now describe myself as an at-risk child.When we finally returned to England, this manifested into sexual abuse. An army officer “friend” of my parents groomed me from about the age of 11. He would often travel to see his parents in Swansea, and I, with my parents' blessing, went with him, as he would drop me off at my grandmother’s for the weekend and collect me on Sunday. It was a honey trap I fell into. During these journeys, I was sexually groomed, bought expensive gifts and preyed upon by this man. My grandfather had died; my parents were binge drinking on weekends; and I had no real friends in school. I was ridiculed at school as a “squaddie brat,” and these trips became an escape from that life, if only for a weekend. I once approached my father about the abuse, but he had been drinking and I suffered the consequences. “Don’t you dare accuse a fellow officer of such things,” he shouted at me as I was punched to the floor and kicked. My mother tried to stop it and succeeded only by being struck herself.After my father died of a heart attack in the garden—which I witnessed and was powerless to stop or help—my mother and I moved in with my grandmother in Cardiff, and the abuse stopped. I attended the local high school. My mother was still drinking, and in school, I had made some friends who introduced me to smoking, and I soon discovered the joys of cannabis. What some may see as growing pains lead me to be more rebellious both at home and school. I had begun stealing money and things to sell to fund my new lifestyle. Had anyone cared to look, they would have seen the early stages of mania. Looking back on all that happened to me, I can hardly believe it myself. I feel this was what damaged me.Later, I scraped through my exams and started at a further education college the following year to study A-levels. One of my friends from school in Cardiff, Richard, had joined me at the college, which made it easier for me to mix with other students. My moods were shifting quite dramatically by now. I would have periods of mania, where I would feel invincible, followed by periods of relative normality and then, deep depression. It got so bad at times, I made several suicide attempts over the years.

As I Got Older, My Behavior Got More Reckless

I had a grant to the college but the money was soon spent, and my meager allowance from my mother barely covered bus money and lunch at meal times. I started to take money from my mother’s purse, shoplift and commit fraud to buy weed, books and records. I was in a manic state at these times, and it was risk-taking behavior. I convinced myself I had a right to do it and wouldn't get caught—I was too smart for that, in my eyes. I was only finally caught because of a fluke. One lunchtime while at college, Richard and I took off in a car with another student, Graham, whom we had gotten to know. He drove a huge Ford Zephyr, which was a very roomy saloon car (I think it may have been his father’s). Our college was in a quiet part of town on the outskirts between Cardiff and Newport, with a few minor roads and tracks in the wild country area behind it—a perfect quiet spot to eat sandwiches, drink Cokes and smoke a joint or two. I had bought a quarter ounce of Moroccan hashish a few days before, so when we parked up at a serene spot slightly down a track from a minor road, we felt safe to roll up a few joints. The car soon filled with smoke, and windows were opened to let it clear. But within minutes of doing so, we saw a police car drive past and immediately panicked. We disposed of the joints and swallowed lumps of the remaining hash as we watched the police car reverse and block us in.For over four hours, we sat in a police station being questioned by drug squad officers, one I learned later was the head of the Cardiff drug squad. They tried to intimidate us, so I eventually told them I had bought the drugs off “Gingerman,” who I described as tall and lanky, with a frizzy, ginger Afro haircut, selling hash around the Loveit Cafe in Cardiff. He was a fictitious character thought up by hash users just for such an event. The police must have bought my story, as we were finally released on bail and collected by our respective parents. Looking back, the affair was over the top—we had been treated like associates of Howard Marks or Manuel Noriega. Consequently, I spent a rather strange couple of hours in the back of a police car the following Saturday, ready to point out the hapless and fictitious “Gingerman,” who quite naturally didn’t make an appearance. A few weeks later, the police informed us they had only recovered about three milligrams of hash in the car, not enough to formally charge us but enough for an official police warning. We had gotten away with it, and I have dined on this story many times since.

Undiagnosed, my life continued this way for many years: skulduggery, petty crime, drugs and risky sex, interspersed with bouts of depression.

My Bipolar Diagnosis Helped Me Get a Handle on My Life

Undiagnosed, my life continued this way for many years: skulduggery, petty crime, drugs and risky sex, interspersed with bouts of depression. I thought I was a bad person. I had no idea what bipolar disorder was or its symptoms. I changed jobs often, moving quickly on to the next. I used hash and LSD and drank. I had several girlfriends, until I settled with one girl for quite a few years. Her life with me must have been hell on Earth at times, and we finally broke up after around 15 years together. Manic depression had wrecked my life and destroyed many relationships, but the turnaround started soon after my breakup.I applied for and went to university in Cardiff. I did a year of astrophysics before coming to my senses and switching to computer science. It was computing that helped me—I had found my dharma, my ability. It saved my life and provided me with a successful career as a computer engineer and later, a firewall engineer. In the final year of study, I met my wife, and though our early years of marriage were rocky, her persistence, love and care encouraged me to get a diagnosis for my condition. When I was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder with rapid cycling, I finally had a name for what was affecting me. The diagnosis wasn’t a silver bullet, but it enabled me to find the help I needed and the medications that help me control my symptoms. I am now pretty happy, manage my bipolar disorder and have a daughter and beautiful granddaughter—and meaning in my life.

In 1961, suicide was finally decriminalized here in the U.K. Prior to that, people either died or were arrested. With the specter of stigma continuing into the new millennium, I kept my attempt in 2000 largely to myself, telling just four people—my family and the emergency services. It’s only now, 20 years later, that I feel I can talk openly about my experience. So what changed? Mental health in 2000 was largely handled with stigma and ridicule. It definitely wasn’t OK not to be OK, as today’s trite saying goes. In Hollywood, “craziness” was synonymous with evil (picture Christian Bale in American Psycho), and national newspapers would routinely shame those struggling. When boxer Frank Bruno was admitted for psychiatric treatment in 2003, one red top headlined on its front page “Bonkers Bruno Locked Up” above a story labeling him a “nutter.”We millennials were failed on the well-being front. The demonization of those with mental health problems, or anyone deemed to be different, divergent or deviant, for that matter, was ubiquitous in the ’90s. We were conditioned to perform normative parts we didn’t quite know the lines to and would blanket our true selves in an attempt to fit in. The accepted social umbrella back then was small, and machismo and homophobia were rife. Everything was termed “gay” in my school days. Your trainers were gay; your emotions were gay; your dad was gay. A boy in my year was rumored to be gay, as he wore eau de toilette and listened to No Doubt. Gay and weird were in the top two things you weren’t permitted to be, and feeling like the latter, I struggled to find my place.

I realized maybe I’d made a mistake.

I Attempted Suicide and Immediately Regretted It

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what made me wish to disappear at 18. It was cumulative rather than causational, but a breakup didn’t help. The twinned euphoria of young love is a hell of a height to fall from, and the future at that age is terrifying enough without having to reimagine it, lost and lonely. Whilst coping mechanisms such as sleep, exercise, connection, meditation and medication are well-rehearsed in adulthood, adolescents often don’t have the intuition to stave off mental illness. They also don’t have chapters of mental victories to draw inspiration from. With age comes the perspective that life has its peaks and troughs. At 18, my mental dip felt permanent, and fighting it off seemed pointless.One dull Thursday afternoon, after unsuccessfully auditing my life for reasons to live, I ghosted towards my dad’s side of the bed and located two glossy boxes of propranolol, umbrellaed by a lampshade. Without hesitation, I swallowed them all. My body responded with immediate chest and stomach pains. And I realized maybe I’d made a mistake. “I’m going to die,” I thought. “I’ve overdosed on my dad’s beta blockers and I’m in pain,” I explained to the telephone operator. “You will be, won’t you?” she deadpanned as a quiet ambulance arrived, not quite offering the reassurance I needed. Fifteen minutes later, I lay gowned and guilty in the hospital’s psych ward, my slow heart interfacing with a bleeping monitor. “Hello,” my dad monotoned, as if expecting a sales call. I explained what I’d done, and for a man on the spot, he conveyed sympathy and understanding that didn’t make me feel judged or in trouble. As his green Renault delivered me home a week later, his wedding ring tapping on the steering wheel to “Would I Lie to You?” by Charles & Eddie, my 16-year-old sister said, “Don’t ever do that again; we love you.” I pivoted my head to the window and smudged a tear.

Music Became a Comfort

In the months following my suicide attempt, I’d schlep around my parents’ house, each day repeating in slow motion as a pre-smartphone trudge through daytime TV and walks to the store for newspapers and snacks. I was living the life of a lonely mumblecore protagonist until one Saturday evening, I heard something that would shunt me forward. Barefooting it to our thin kitchen for a sandwich, I overheard my parents chatting in the back room, drinking whiskey and listening to music. I was alerted to the sound of a piercing, almost genderless voice. “What’s this?!” I asked. “It’s Neil Young, Son,” my mum replied. And by noon the next day, I was clutching CDs of After The Gold Rush and Harvest. This unknown Ontarian externalized my inner monologue with an arm around my sad soul. “It's hard to make that change/when life and love turns strange.” I’d never heard anything like it. I lived inside Neil’s world in the subsequent years, empowered by his melodic musings on lost love, loneliness and everything in between. Following my trip to the city for the CDs—the furthest I’d ventured in months—I began to slowly surface, albeit like a discarded bottle in a canal of doubt. One dog day afternoon, I sauntered from the shops swinging a plastic bag and swigging a Mountain Dew when I spied a blur of Berghaus in the distance.“Alright mate, where are you off?” said a lad called Jim I’d been mates with in primary school. “Ah, not much,” I mumbled, reducing months of mental anguish into three small words. “What are you up to these days?” I deflected. “Erm, just glass collectin’. I fucked sixth form off, to be honest. I’m in a band,” he said. Socially rusty, I gambled: “Do you know Neil Young?” “Yeah man! He’s ace!” He’d become animated, like I’d unlocked something. “Knock at mine tomorrow. I’ll show you my Velvet’s box set and stuff. I’m just jumping the train to band practice now.” The swing in my carrier bag heightened as I schlepped home.“Jim,” his grandad propelled, opening the door and ushering me into the three-story building I hadn't entered since I was a kid. Climbing to Jim’s third-floor bedroom, the smell of weed and the sound of Captain Beefheart filled my senses. I started music college, moved into a houseshare and began to regularly hang out with Jim and his band.

How the hell did this happen?

Music Helped Me Find a Community I Needed

Displaying a paradox of unhealthy skunk consumption and rampant work ethic, his band would practice late into the night, Monday through Friday. The band introduced a psych-dub song into their set which would morph into Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up.” One rehearsal, as the final verse closed, I grabbed the mic for a laugh and, in what felt like an exorcism, started screaming Marley’s closing refrain: “Woy oy! Woy uka yoy yoy!” Words that should never leave the mouth of a pale, young Englishman, but I continued, and the band jammed along, partly amused, partly bewildered. Afterward, I felt lighter. Purpose is power when it comes to mental health, and finding a group of fellow music-obsessed outsiders afforded me connection and optimism. A week passed and the band was booked to play their debut show out of town. As the set closed, “Get Up, Stand Up” pulsed wildly, and I met the singer’s grinning gaze from the audience as he waved me to the stage. Had I paused for even a second, nerves would have intervened, but I clambered up and launched into an Ian Curtis-esque dance. I grabbed the mic and unleashed a “woy oy!” like my life depended upon it. The confused crowd seemed to accept, embrace, even enjoy it. How the hell did this happen? The next day, a fellow friend of the band shuttled out of the train station and impaled a paper magazine into my chest. “You’re in NME!” she exclaimed. Reviewing a gig in the now-closed venue, the journalist wrote: “By the time the band have segued a song called ‘Time Travel’ into a bold-as-brass cover version of Bob Marley’s ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ (whereupon they’re joined by a mate on backing vocals), pretty much everybody in this tiny venue has a huge bewildered, grin on their face. The sort of grin you get when you know you’ve just witnessed something very special indeed.” My unlikely redemption had been documented. To the reader, it would have been just another live music review; to me, it felt like a tangible marker of my progress. I returned to the houseshare to ring my parents with this news—a year after the worst phone call all of us had endured from the hospital. After my music exploits, I began an English degree, devouring works on topics ranging from American foreign policy and sport in the Soviet Union, to mental health, masculinity and celebrity. Communications jobs followed, but my desire was to channel my lived experience into a career in mental health, and in 2017, I founded a mental health organization to help navigate others to better mental health. Since then, we’ve provided counseling, signposting and training to thousands of people. And through articles such as the one you’re reading now, we have raised awareness to highlight that—as Leonard Cohen put it—there’s a crack in everything; that’s where the light gets in.