This article was originally published on Residential School Magazine under its original title "Let Me Tell You About Inter-Generational Trauma" and is republished with permission. **Content note: this article contains discussions of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and violence as well as suicide.** My grandmother was placed in residential school at the age of 6. For … [Read more...]
4 Ways We Can Make Eating Healthy a Radical Body-Positive Act
I was twenty-eight the first time I ate a zucchini. Vegetables didn’t figure highly in my menus for most of my life. As a kid they tended to be canned with the occasional salad thrown in for good measure. I ate plenty of fresh fruit, but vegetables? No thanks! Mushy vegetables didn’t have much appeal but they were cheap. Growing up poor often meant cheap food such as white … [Read more...]
How I Learned My Abusive Father Is Not a Monster — Just a Rather Sad and Complicated Person
I've always been comically atrocious at mini-golf, and at other sports that require finesse in hand-eye coordination and the action of aiming a ball into a hole, hoop, or goal. Captain J's Mini-Golf Course is a particularly malicious 18-hole booby trap perched on the tip of Lake Superior, and is where I have some of the best memories of my father. Us laughing as I sink my fifth … [Read more...]
You Are Only as Sick as the Secrets You Keep: Recovering From Alcoholism and the Colonizers’ Tools
Three years ago, I experienced a drug-induced mental health crisis during which the police were contacted by a close family friend of mine. I was subsequently beaten up by the police, tasered three times, and psychiatrically hospitalized against my will for six days. I identify as a survivor of police brutality and the mental health industrial complex. I have “swept my side of … [Read more...]
“Do I Know How to Comfort Myself?”: How to Move Through a (Not-so-Sober) Mourning
I loved someone deeply. When she passed away, I drank excessively. My grief-logic was simple. She drank vodka. We drank vodka together. She’s dead. I’m not. She’s gone. Vodka’s not. The act of drinking vodka became entangled in a trippy continuum that made me feel connected to her. In my head, I could drink all the vodka I wanted because it was in her name – and God … [Read more...]

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