Lived Through This

In Chicago, on a May morning so bright it teased tulip heads from their sleep, I nearly killed a man I’d never met.

I had just dropped off my daughters at school and was headed to work. I turned off the radio, unable to focus on it anyway. Even though I functioned and appeared fine on the surface, the combination of a new divorce, a new boyfriend, and my children’s emotional needs had turned my brain into a tangled mess of anxiety and grief that needed a daily combing out.

So, on that short little car trip, I did what…

Lived Through This

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would you want to be a woman? We are discriminated against. The men we work with hate us. We get paid less. Why choose that?”

Jesus thought for a moment. “When I get in the shower and look down at my penis, I hate it. I feel like it shouldn’t be there.”

We were standing out in the corporation yard, away from our co-workers in the shops.

Jesus and I had worked together at the San Francisco Water Department for a couple of years, and I was glad we’d become close enough for…

Lived Through This

On February 11, 2021, for the first time in 335 days, my fifth grader walked back in for his last “first day” of elementary school. The night before his return I found myself looking back over the year in photos in my Instagram feed, peppered with tags such as #TheNewNormal, #TheCovidLife. After almost a year, I’m not clear if anything feels “normal” to me.

I’m a photographer and a writer in Columbus, Ohio, and a documentarian for my city, my home — sometimes with words, always with photographs. On Friday, March 13, 2020, the day the world seemed to come…

Lived Through This

The day after I found out I was donor-conceived, I spent the afternoon walking through the streets of midtown Manhattan, wondering if anyone I passed by could be a relative. The information I had about the anonymous sperm donor my parents used was minimal: He was Jewish and had been in medical school in the ’80s. As I strolled by hordes of Jewish-looking middle-aged men, with the same brown eyes and brown hair my genes expressed, the unlikelihood of ever meeting my biological father weighed on me.

I was proud of myself for being realistic. It was borderline laughable, contemplating…

Lived Through This

I never met any happy adults when I was a kid. My parents were miserable, my parents’ friends were miserable, my friends’ parents were miserable, and that was pretty much all the adults I knew. I didn’t know that happy adults were even a thing until I went to college and met people from Oregon.

As a kid, the only real variable I ever noticed among these various miserable adults was the degree of flamboyance they used to express their unhappiness. Some people were low-key about their misery while other people were Don Henley about it. …

Lived Through This

The sirens woke me up, but it was the flashing lights piercing the curtains and bouncing off the walls like angry red-and-blue strobe lights that got me out of bed. I pulled on some jeans, padded downstairs, and stepped into the thick, humid South Florida nighttime air.

There were half a dozen police cars with doors open parked all over the place. Most of the cops were gathered around the house across from mine. A few locals stood around, looking sleepy.

“What happened?”

“Someone sprayed that place with a machine gun.”

This was Miami in the 1980s. Pablo Escobar’s cocaine…

Lived Through This

I was running two hours late to work on the day I figured out I was really, truly, finally about to get fired. The whole “two hours late” thing wasn’t, like, an eerie portent of doom or anything. I had been pushing my start time back later and later for months until I was here: waking up at 9:30 for a job that started at 9, then finally swanning into the office at 11, with big black sunglasses and a giant takeout coffee, like I was a glamorous drug addict rock star instead of a writer employed to churn out…

Lived Through This

I was nervous when I walked through the door of the clinic. I was even more nervous lying on the table in my surgical gown, legs apart as the nurse happily shaved my balls. Maybe they gave me some Valium. I really can’t remember. I doubt it.

But I do remember when the doc brought out the needle filled with local anesthesia. It was the largest I’d ever seen, and it would be inserted not once, but twice into my now clean-shaven, yes — those. “You’re going to feel a little pinch now.” Ouch. Thanks for that. Fuckers.

I didn’t…