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Queering the Family

Holding Hands, A Gesture of Love

My partner Christian and I hold hands. Since the earliest days of our relationship, one of the gestures that is continuous and strongest between us is our holding hands as a couple. I remember the first time we held hands

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Because I Said, “Yes.”

10 mins read

When I was applying for seminary, I found myself trying to balance my time between working multiple jobs, going to grad school for Theatre Arts, spending time with my friends, and filling out my applications. I wasn’t particularly good at time management (a lot of folks in their early 20s

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Queer Family Celebration

11 mins read

My breath caught in my throat as I took the piece of bread and shuffled to the person holding the cup. Suddenly, the name I had been turning over and over in my mind for a year felt like it was truly mine as Rev. Jessie Light-Wells invited me to

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Sharing Tater Tot Casserole

15 mins read

I have a complicated history with organized religion. How does the old breakup relationship chat go? It’s me, not you? For this conversation it’s not me, though, it’s you. Well, not you personally. It’s the idea of organized religion, who has the loudest voices in that movement, and the impact

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Resurrected Grief

9 mins read

The queer life, as diverse and multifaceted as it could be, holds grief as one of its near universal traits. As a clinical social worker and family therapist, the ubiquity of the grief experience is obvious. Even if it is not named as such, I can almost guarantee that if

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Coming Out Cake: Nurturing Queerness

12 mins read

A lot of people ask me why I still talk so much about being a bisexual woman even though I ended up married to a cisgender man. It’s a common thing that happens; society often defines people’s identities based on the identities of their partner. It is an obvious, observable

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We Can Love Better

9 mins read

I was 12 or 13 when I began to develop different ways of harming myself. It started with biting my lip to the point of ulcers and bleeding. It moved to biting the inside of my jaw that left me unable to open my mouth or even eat. The inability

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Accountability

11 mins read

Accountability starts with radical truth. Each of us holds an ideal form of ourselves within us, who we mean to be, who we want to become, who we are on our best days. Yet, accountability asks us to look at who we actually are, whether we live into the values

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Star Words: Fidelity

6 mins read

A few weeks ago, a small group of our church family gathered in my apartment to make Epiphany stars. We stood around the kitchen counter in an assembly line of sorts—tracing, cutting, writing, pinning. I’d gathered a list of 300+ words and was excited that in our stack of 200

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And Still I Grow

13 mins read

It was probably just an ordinary day when I looked at the avocado seed in my hand and decided that I would grow it into a tree, or more realistically, a houseplant. I researched – watched Instagram reels, YouTube videos, Googled, “How to Grow an Avocado Plant from Seed,” all

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