Elis de Guerre

I never wanted children. When other little girls were playing with dolls, I played with stuffed animals. Even when I played house, my home was filled with plush puppies.

Last week, my mother came home from work, found the shower faucet leaking hot water, and told me to "get my head out of my cunt, and start thinking about other things."

I first went on disability when I lived in Rochester, New York.

I went to my first therapist when I was a teenager. My family was dysfunctional to the point of being non-functional. If a decision needed to be made about custody arrangements, my parents were incapable of making it without me. Instead, I was the mediator (and had been since I was a young child), speaking first to my father on the phone and then relaying the message to my mother.

I’m a person who needs to know the facts. I bring a notebook with me to every doctor’s appointment. I record important meetings. The research list for my memoir is pages long. Why should pregnancy be any different? And so the research began.

What if masturbation doesn’t work for you? What if you’ve tried fingers, vibrators, porn, fantasies, and even romancing yourself with glasses of wine, and you still can’t seem to get there?

Learning is the best thing for us, and the best place to look? The sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.

What I objected to was the genderization of feminism, the idea that women's rights have to be specifically prioritized. If the overall end goal is equality, why bring gender into the equation?

[CN: PTSD, self-harm] I’m choosing this moment to remember that mental health awareness is about celebrating my victories as well as seeking medications for my biochemical imbalances.

Many people are aware of bipolar disorder. Most know it’s a mental illness that swings the brain between depression and mania. Most understand depression to be debilitating, a condition that combines sadness, despair, exhaustion, and lack of motivation. But most people don’t understand mania (which is experienced primarily by people with bipolar I) or hypomania (which those with bipolar II tend to encounter more than full-blown mania) — at least not fully.