“I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him” — Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart I’ve encountered many ghosts in my life. Not all of them friendly. Not all of them dead. My father is dead in every way except the physical. His heart still beats. His lungs still fill with air. He moves through his days beneath the same sun as I do. The man lives. The father does not. I killed him. For years, I carried him like a diseased limb—attached to

I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath in my twenties, and no piece of writing has ever felt more like home to me. I don’t recall every minute detail of the story, but I remember how I felt reading it—the emotions it carried, and the emotions within myself that it seemed to recognize. I carried those feelings with me for years, but most of all, I carried you, Esther Greenwood, describing your descent into madness and your eventual ascension out of it. I saw myself in both versio

I’m performing my first solo in a pole dance showcase tomorrow, and later this month I’ll be celebrating my fourth pole anniversary. It feels surreal—to feel this alive now, knowing that only four years ago, when I found pole dancing, I was dead. I stumbled upon pole dancing during the darkest moment of my life, when I was a body detached from a soul, passively navigating the world, no longer participating in my own life. I had just come out of an abusive relationship—still