Anonymous

My work at Planned Parenthood can be exhausting, and stressful, but I love it more every day. We are providing necessary care and a safe space.

I lit-up, inhaled, and slowly released the sweet smoke. It was beautiful and relaxing until I was interrupted with these, dreaded, words: “MOM?! Are you smoking?”

What's more dangerous — meeting people on the Internet or meeting people in real life?

All of the men I met were married, and wanted to stay married. They said they loved their wives, and most said they were happy; yet the sex at home had diminished and they were men after all and needed their desire fulfilled. Besides the eye-rolling common excuse for infidelity, I believed they were telling the truth about loving their wives.

... the last thing I want to do is open my legs for a man to penetrate me. Or to pleasure a man with any part of my body. Even if that man is my loving fiancé, who does listen, who does understand (as best he can), who does respect me through this ongoing turmoil. It is all too symbolic of the lifetime I have already experienced of being fucked and then told to smile and politely ask for more.

I don't recall meeting my first love. It seems he was always with me.

For more than 20 years, I believed I was a slut. A shameful, vile, one-time slut, but a slut all the same. It was you, Mr White Canterbury shorts, that led me to believe this. But, since reading the letter from Brock Turner’s victim, I realized, what you did, Mr White Canterbury Shorts, was in fact rape.

I never imagined myself being anyone’s wife so I grieved for my single life when I got married. I began to secretly long for the life I’d left behind.

Moments after this big reveal, as I sat with the knowledge that I was the mother of a queer daughter, we heard about the man in Los Angeles being stopped on his way to Pride with guns and bombs, and I suddenly realized that my daughter was now one of the millions of people at risk because of vile and unreasonable hatred about non-straight sexuality.

Like too many others out there, we have a father who gave us some of his genes and not a whole lot more. Specifically, my father is an alcoholic — has been for the entirety of his adult life.