When I start my shift as an ICU nurse, I know the people I take care of will die. Whether it happens on my shift, the next one, or next year, this fact doesn’t change. Every coffeeshop, classroom, amusement park, and subway is full of living people who will one day die. Regardless, I choose… Read More >>
“Some people talk about ya like they know all about ya . . .” I remember watching the video for Janelle Monáe’s “Tightrope” for the very first time. I had just moved to Washington DC after college for my first job as a nurse. Socially isolated in a new city, I found Monáe’s music by… Read More >>
It’s Saturday and I’m kicking pebbles on an uneven dusty trail. I touch the gray rock to my left, and peer off the trail down to the right. Browned shrubs and scraggly vines work their way out of the dirt and rock. Southern California is parched; the stream that once carved this path is dry.… Read More >>
2 September 2017: Three days before the flight When I was a child. As the daughter of Indian immigrant parents. Is that how this starts? Going to India every year since I was twelve. Is that how this starts? I’m on my way to India again, but this time it’s a little different. In a… Read More >>
Last year, a series of emails between me — a queer brown woman of Indian descent — and my buddy — a white dude who dates dudes — led to us bicycling across India together. We’d never spent more than a cumulative month in the same place but had maintained a friendship through emails and… Read More >>
For many women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, safety is the first thing on our minds when we think about travel. It’s daunting to go to a place you’ve never been, especially if you don’t anticipate there will be anyone who looks like you. It might feel safer to travel in cities or to stay… Read More >>
At the end of 2017, I biked more than 3,000 miles from the Himalayas to the southern tip of Tamil Nadu. Over four months, my bike tour of India took me through 12 states, and I passed Buddhist monasteries with prayer flags waving on mountaintops, Sikh gurudwaras serving free communal meals, towering minarets of mosques,… Read More >>
Sam and Shirley rolled up in a silver minivan. The 80-year-old couple inched out of the car and waved us over. The opened their trunk, loaded our bicycles and gear, and drove us up a thousand-foot mountain on a windy gravel road while joking that Sam, who was driving, was legally blind. That night, they… Read More >>
It was when I was lying on the floor at yoga class and the instructor said, set an intention, that I put my boyfriend and our impending distance aside because that’s not an intention. I put the stress and fear of an upcoming adventure aside; stress and fear are not intentions. I put my body… Read More >>
Last November, in a red state surrounded by people who voted for Trump, I silently grieved for my country. My body was brown, deflated, minimized, isolated, invisible, hypervisible, and hiding from what cannot be changed. I felt like a fire dumped with water, unable to fathom what was happening, or if the future I’d imagined… Read More >>