Alaina Leary

My sexual assault is the main reason my girlfriend and I didn’t celebrate the love-infested holiday for the first six years of our relationship. Last Valentine’s Day, a month after we celebrated seven years together, was our first time embracing the holiday as our own.

Welcome to #RavsWriters, an opportunity for you to get to know some of th

It’s helpful if you talk to your disabled loved ones to see what works for them. My family and friends have always been great at figuring out accessibility.

Moving can be a traumatic experience. We often forget how many remnants of the past we hold onto—whether intentionally or accidentally, just because we put a letter away in a drawer and forgot about it.

I didn't use the word "asexual" until I was a senior in college. I didn't so much use the word as slur it, in between a long drunken ramble, to my girlfriend and our best friend in our apartment's small kitchen.

All I wanted, most days, was a cute apartment with big windows, sheer curtains billowing in the breeze, where I could sit comfortably and read a book.

The best part about Halloween is having free rein to dress a little whimsically and spooky all month long. Let's all dress like every day is Halloween!

The education system isn’t designed for students like me. From as early as preschool up through my master’s degree, I struggled in a traditional classroom setting for a few reasons, and needed to adapt my own methods of surviving education.

In the aftermath of my rape, I became an activist for ending rape culture. And I quickly found that even in feminist circles, disability was often left out of the conversation completely.

"Writing about trauma or difficult experiences doesn’t repair that trauma,” said Melanie. “It doesn’t make it go away. But I kept hearing what a transformative thing it was for [the memoirists] to shape these stories into something that they could be proud of.”