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Category: Real Stories

Loving America is painful when America’s love is unequal

Loving America is painful when America’s love is unequal

by Gretchen Hanson I love my country. When I was a child I canvassed door to door for George McGovern. I must have been incredibly cute in strawberry blond pigtails with my patent leather Mary Jane’s and, my basket full of red, white and blue pamphlets, and strawberry blond pigtails knocking on doors in Southern California. I had listened to the evening news with Walter Cronkite every night of my short little life and as that generation did, I believed…

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Chronically Trying: Dating While Ill

Chronically Trying: Dating While Ill

by Kelley O’Brien “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” It was St. Patrick’s Day of 2011 and my girlfriend just dumped me. We hadn’t been dating that long, but she was my first girlfriend, the first person I dated after a long battle with internalized homophobia. My head was throbbing from crying earlier in the day because it was the anniversary of my friend’s death and I was missing my grandparents’ 61st anniversary dinner back home. She…

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My America

My America

by Gretchen Hanson It all started with a misplaced bottle of water. I left my idyllic little resort town of Rehoboth Beach in Delaware early Friday morning. A dear friend was being laid to rest in Cumberland, Maryland, and I was facing a long, difficult, five hour drive. I packed road food (because I am always hungry) and water bottles and put them on the back seat. The food, which was to last me all day, I finished in twenty…

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Fibroids: A Women’s Health Issue We Need To Talk About

Fibroids: A Women’s Health Issue We Need To Talk About

by: Fahrin Kermally In early 2005, I was in the middle of graduate school, planning my career, and thinking about the fabulous life I had ahead of me. What I wasn’t thinking about was my health. I ate well, was physically fit, and it didn’t occur to me that anything could possibly be wrong. Even the continuous spotting I had been living with for two years didn’t make me pause.  Not until I casually mentioned it to a friend. “You’ve…

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To Look for America

To Look for America

by Tana Tymesen In a tertiary plotline in 2000’s Oscar-winning Almost Famous, Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) runs off with her boyfriend to become a flight attendant. As she hugs her little brother William goodbye, she whispers to him to look under his bed — that there he’ll find his freedom. William lugs from the dark beneath his mattress a large bag stuffed with Anita’s albums as the opening lines of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” play in the background. “Let us be…

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