| |  Illustration by Kelsey Zigmund | I watch The Bachelor, and this is a source of shame for me because my wife, Rosella, shames me for watching it. Our Manhattan apartment is small, so she is stuck sitting next to me on the couch, either reading a book or occupying herself on her laptop, while I indulge in The Bachelor on Monday nights. She looks up at the TV every so often, making remarks like “Oh my God, this is ridiculous”; “I can’t believe you watch this”; “This is garbage”; and “You aren’t going to watch this again next season, are you?” This dynamic is so ingrained that when this season rolled around, she didn’t even have to say anything aloud to embarrass me. In the first few minutes of a recent episode that finds Arie, this season’s bachelor, and his date, Kendall, stuffing taxidermy rats and then pretending the rodents are on a date at the Eiffel Tower, Rosella just stared at me, shaking her head in disbelief. My obsession with The Bachelor (I am a fan of The Bachelorette, too) truly confounds her, and she is desperate to understand the appeal. She regularly asks me, “Why do you watch this?” I have never given Rosella a thoughtful reply to her question. I deflect the query with my standard joke answer: “If it wasn’t for The Bachelor, I wouldn’t know how to love,” which is always met with an eye roll from my wife, who knows there is more to it than that because she knows me better than I know myself. *** Seeking answers, I reach out to Amy Kaufman, a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and author of Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure. It’s a smart book that reveals all the secrets about how the show is produced and explores why so many savvy women who consider themselves feminists are addicted to The Bachelor. I confess my addiction to the show, and she isn’t surprised to hear that The Bachelor is a draw for someone totally disinterested in hetero marriage for herself. “I think the show depicts romance in a way that would be appealing to anyone,” Kaufman says. “Who wouldn’t want to go on extravagant dates and be showered with love and affection?” Like me, and so many other fans, Kaufman has issues with The Bachelor. “I don't like that they tend to depict one type of woman on the show — generally someone who is very thin, tan, white and straight,” she says. “By tuning in, I feel like I’m tacitly reaffirming that this is the only kind of woman who men can find attractive and who deserves love. I really wish the franchise would diversify.” That said, she is also a total sucker for the love story. “By the end of the season, I’m always rooting for the main couple,” she says, “and I start envisioning what it will be like when I myself am proposed to someday. It just makes me feel warm inside. Gross, I know.” I’m right there with Kaufman. As cheesy and problematic as this fairy-tale portrayal of relationships can be, I watch The Bachelor hoping two people will fall in love and get engaged, though I have never fantasized about anyone proposing to me — I always saw myself doing the asking. Since we’re both fans, I ask Kaufman how I can defend my obsession with The Bachelor to my disapproving wife. “I think maybe the bigger question is: Why does it bother you that she thinks the show is trash? What makes you feel bad about loving it? It seems like you may feel that liking it means you’re somehow flawed,” Kaufman says. “I get that—I’ve obviously come under the same line of questioning while writing an entire book about the show. But I’m trying to let it go. And it’s truly baffling to me that viewers of The Bachelor get so much scrutiny when there are plenty of other troubling shows on TV.” *** Rosella tells me that I actively watch The Bachelor in a way that I don’t view other shows. “You can’t be quiet when you watch it. You literally get excited, and you make a lot of comments,” she says. “You’ll be like, ‘Oh my God! They’re going to Thailand!’ ‘He clearly has no connection with this woman.’ ‘I can’t believe so-and-so got a rose!’ ‘I honestly think it’s going to last this time.’ You also get teary a lot. You get so caught up in what’s happening.” I am surprised to hear this, and it is this insight from my observant wife, who spends an awful lot of time watching me watch TV, that finally gets me thinking even more seriously about why I am so invested in this show. If I’m being completely honest with myself, and I am being open and vulnerable now in a way that is surprising me (this is the state of being that every love seeker on The Bachelor strives to reach!), I think the main draw of this voyeuristic reality show is that it allows me to vicariously take part in an experience that wasn’t available to me for many years — a carefree romantic relationship, something straight people can take for granted. I grew up in a small New England town, and I knew I was a lesbian when I was a kid. But I also knew I couldn’t tell anyone until I was an adult and had moved to New York City, a place where it was OK to be gay, because I heard how people talked about my friend’s mom and her live-in “babysitter.” People snickered about their “lezzie” relationship. I realized the two women were indeed a couple when I was in sixth grade and visited my friend’s house and saw that his mom and the babysitter shared a bedroom with a beaded curtain and a waterbed. In junior high and high school, when other girls my age liked boys and were going through the rituals of the first date and meeting someone’s parents and breaking up and making up, I wasn’t able to take part in that era of discovery. I had crushes on girls, but I kept them to myself. I Iived in a fantasy world for all those years, imagining what it might be like to go on a date with a girl I liked, or to buy her flowers or, better yet, a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover chocolates. That was the epitome of romance for me. Years later, after I moved to New York City, I did give a girlfriend a giant heart-shaped box of Russell Stover chocolates — sadly, I didn’t get the huge reaction I was hoping for, and that relationship, and a few others, didn’t go anywhere. Then I met Rosella, who made our relationship difficult by being Canadian and living in Montreal. Rosella and I met online on February 13, 2002 (and when she responded to my ad, she didn’t realize I lived in the United States). We first talked on the phone on March 13, 2002, and we first met in person on April 13, 2002, when she came to visit me for what turned out to be an eight-day date during which I took her to the Sock Man, a store on St. Marks Place that sells only socks, and Central Park, where we rode the carousel. It was a wonderfully romantic time. Unlike the people on The Bachelor, who date, fall in love, and wind up engaged in less than three months, Rosella and I dated, fell in love, and embarked on a long-distance relationship that would go on for well over a decade — the separation was torturous, and it wasn’t by choice. We knew we wanted to live together in New York a couple of years into our relationship, but I couldn’t just marry Rosella and bring her here. Gay marriage wasn’t legal on a federal level yet, so I didn’t have the right to sponsor her to live in the country. Throwing my career aside for love, I became a freelance writer in 2005 so that I could spend weeks, sometimes months, in Montreal with Rosella. Though I have proven to be incapable of learning French, and I hate long, cold winters, I had reached the point where I thought I would have to move to Canada because I had so much trouble getting through all the time when we weren’t together. But everything changed for us after the Defense of Marriage Act was repealed in 2013. Rosella and I got married in a small ceremony near the carousel we rode in Central Park on that magical eight-day date. In the midst of exchanging our vows, we read letters we had written to each other. In hers, Rosella revealed how she felt about my taking her to the Sock Man when we first met. “It’s a store that sells just socks, and you were so excited about it. I thought it was weird but endearing,” she shared, noting that she had bought two pairs of socks she hadn’t needed just to be nice. Even after our wedding, Rosella and I still didn’t live together full time until we completed the immigration process. She finally crossed the border as a permanent resident of the United States on February 13, 2016, the fourteen-year anniversary of the day we first met online. When I think back on all of this, it is clear why I find so much joy in watching whirlwind romances unfold on The Bachelor. I don’t know how smart it is to get engaged to someone you have only known for weeks, but I love that they have the freedom to be crazy like that. *** I explain all this to Rosella. While she is touched by my newfound introspection, she is still judging me for my taste in television (though in a loving way, of course). “I just don’t want you wasting your time on this garbage,” she says. I hate to throw Rosella under the bus, but you should have seen the big smile on her beautiful face when Nick proposed to Vanessa when he was the bachelor last season. I caught her looking up from her laptop, beaming like she had been rooting for these two to get together all along. “Well, that’s because Vanessa is Italian and from Montreal like me,” Rosella replies when I remind her about her obvious delight at Nick and Vanessa’s engagement (which, unfortunately, ended a few months later, as many Bachelor-fueled romances are wont to do). I point out that Rosella might also be a fan of the show. “Uh, no,” she replies. I don’t believe her, and I hope the day will come when my wife is open and vulnerable enough to admit that she likes The Bachelor, too. Christine Champagne is a New York City–based writer who has written for vanityfair.com, Variety, and other places. You can follow her on Twitter @itsthechampagne. | | | | |  Illustration by Tara Chávez | When I was thirteen, I showed up to a party where I happened to be wearing the same top as one of the “pretty girls” in my class. Noting this, a boy lined us up side by side and decided it would be fun to compare us. His cruel assessment of me, in front of my peers, was devastating. Up until that point, I hadn’t really had any comparison for my looks; I thought I was normal. It wasn’t until people told me I was ugly that I started to believe that I truly was. Ever since then, I have struggled with my appearance, and my self-image grew so distorted that I actually convinced myself I was deformed. Throughout my teens, I constantly obsessed over how unattractive I was. I spent an obscene amount of time scrutinizing my outrageously large pores and my unreasonably crooked nose and fixating on the texture of every inch of my skin. The more I focused on my perceived flaws, the more I alienated myself from the world. I often refused to leave my house because my compulsive grooming, hiding, and concealing rituals consumed so much energy. When I went to university, it was free to see a psychologist. I knew my behavior was abnormal: missing out on classes because I felt too ugly to go made me realize I needed to talk to someone if I planned on graduating. So I spoke to a psychologist, who explained, “Body Dysmorphic Disorder” (BDD), the clinical term for what I was struggling with, and recommended I seek further counseling. Once I graduated, more counseling didn’t happen because I couldn’t afford it. My ability to simply hide came to an end when I became a performing musician in my early 20s. Early on, one of my coping mechanisms was to wear oversize sunglasses to conceal my flaws while onstage. My manager at the time put his foot down, claiming people needed to see my face. I was forced to relinquish the glasses, while agonizing over how I would be able to survive without my protective shield. In another painful situation, I was asked to show up for a magazine photo shoot au naturale in order for them to do my makeup. The idea of going out in public without makeup was so terrifying, it hurtled me into full panic mode. Looking back now, it was obviously an overreaction; however, at the time, the faulty wiring in my brain had me convinced that, without makeup, I was monstrous — a fragmented Picasso painting on acid. A week before I signed my first record deal, at 28, I slipped into a deep depression. I recall when, one day, I was feeling hideously ugly, and I arranged for a nonsurgical procedure to have fillers injected to straighten my nose. I knew my college therapist and all the experts strongly recommend that people with BDD do not get plastic surgery, fearing it may lead to a slippery slope that goes beyond hiding behind makeup and inadvertently into hacking away at their appearances in an effort to find some semblance of perfection. But I didn’t heed such warnings. I was still in denial that I had a real problem. The fillers didn’t work out the way I imagined, and I was left with a botched nose. This sent me further into a downward spiral, especially because I needed to perform in front of record labels that same week. In the end, I paid hundreds of dollars to get the filler dissolved, subjecting myself to rounds of painful injections. The whole experience left me very depressed. I drank to excess, wishing I could just disappear. It was very contrary to the joy I should have been experiencing as an aspiring young singer who was signing her first major record deal. My mother, who doesn’t give a “good goddamn” about her looks, tried to be the voice of reason. She had been noticing my body dysmorphia for years, but at first she had chalked it up to extreme teenage angst. She didn’t have the language to know what was wrong with me. But I never grew out of it, and she realized how bad it had become. She tried to get through to me then, and kept trying, and thank goodness her persistence finally broke through. My mother told me that I was wasting the best — most precious — years of my life by devoting so much energy to my appearance. She told me again and again that I needed to “rewrite the negative tapes playing in my mind.” Somehow, that imagery finally penetrated my defenses and pushed me into extensive therapy. It wasn’t cheap. I hadn’t attained much musical success at that point, and I still held three part-time jobs, but I knew I had to make my mental health my top priority. I had money saved for rent that I used for therapy. It was worth it. What I got out of therapy was invaluable; it taught me how to cope with anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. And then I signed a publishing deal, which helped defray the costs. Over the years, I’ve managed to quell the negative voices screaming in my head. No longer do I waste hours getting ready, and I even occasionally venture out in public with minimal makeup. Sometimes I wear a birdcage veil while performing, which works well with my “country gothic noir” vibe. Though now I feel strong enough to wear a cowboy hat onstage for the most part, letting my bare face shine to the audience. While I still cringe at photos of myself and suffer from anxiety during video and photo shoots, performing onstage has helped. In my youth, if I felt something wasn’t right with the way I looked, I would give in to the disorder and cancel my plans. However, as a professional musician, I can never do this, and even on the days when I’ve felt particularly ugly, I still have to go onstage and sing my heart out for the fans. I am not cured of BDD, but I have learned to cope. People often ask me where my dark, lonely songs come from. This is that place. BDD made me feel like an outsider for many years of my life. It may seem trivial, this obsession with appearance, but that is the precise nature of BDD. Social media, like Instagram selfies, exacerbates the problem. I frequently come across cruel comments discussing the way I look. But as I get older, it gets easier. I have learned to let go of my many complexes. Though I often wish that less value were placed on image and that it were good enough for people to simply listen to my music, the beauty I seek now is a different kind. It’s the kind that comes from the heart and spreads like wildfire. Society may be obsessed with youth and physical perfection, but I won’t buy into that way of thinking. I might have a child one day, perhaps a little girl. I want her to love every inch of herself. I want her to know she is beautiful and that imperfections are glorious and to be celebrated. I want her to be free. Lindi Ortega is a Canadian-born country artist and two-time CCMA Roots Artist of the Year winner who — inspired by her Mexican lineage, her new marriage, and the epic works of Ennio Morricone — refines her boot-stomping sound as she ponders loss, séance, resurrection, and freedom on her concept album Liberty, out March 30. | | | | |  Illustration by África Pitarch | It was our usual Sunday morning. Coated in a dusting of flour, I pounded out pizza dough for dinner looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost. My husband, Dennis, had his head buried in a newspaper at the kitchen table. Noa, our daughter, who was eight at the time, kept snatching pieces of the sticky mixture to sculpt the little birds and flowers she insisted were essential to a successful recipe. That, and prattling on about how the best year of your life is when your age coincides with the day on which you were born. “Mommy, was it a great year when you were 26?” she asked. I stopped, mid-knead. Dennis looked up at me. Time suddenly slowed. Twenty-six. I was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal back then. Only a couple of years out of journalism school, I’d been assigned to cover Central America, whose regional wars made it one of the hottest international stories of the early 1980s. Being a foreign correspondent and working for a paper like the Journal was, for me, a dream existence. I could scarcely believe my good fortune. And to top it all off, I’d fallen in love. Wildly. Madly. He was a veteran reporter for a West Coast newspaper, a divorcé with kids. I’d met him on the third day of my first foreign assignment in Costa Rica. Ours was a frenetic, breathless sort of romance, squeezed in among the wars and coups we had to cover for our respective papers. That we would rendezvous in such dangerous places — El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala — only heightened the intoxication. We married less than a year after meeting, in an impromptu ceremony in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, between trips. Ten months later, he was dead, blown to bits by a land mine on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. And there I was: a bride at 25, a widow at 26. “Actually, Noa, it wasn’t such a good year,” I said slowly, stalling for time. “In fact, it was the worst year of my life.” And I proceeded to recount the barest outline of my first marriage, tragic ending included. Dead silence. “You were married before?” she finally said, her voice a mix of shock and hurt. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Why, indeed. In the litany of possible parental sins, this was one of omission, not commission. I’d simply let the matter go too long. It’s like telling your kid about sex: best accomplished when she/he is very young and engrossed in, say, a compelling episode of Sesame Street. Reluctantly turning from the television screen, your offspring stares at you blankly after receiving the unsolicited information, says “OK,” then goes back to Big Bird. Done! The bare-bone facts are now firmly implanted in the child’s inner landscape, to be dredged up later — usually at crazily inappropriate moments — for further elucidation. Not that I tried to hide any vestiges of my old life from Noa. I’d stayed in touch with my first husband’s children; Noa went with Dennis and me to my stepdaughter’s wedding. And she’d met my stepson’s children. But she never questioned their relationship to us, probably assuming they were just part of the crazy-quilt of extended kin stitched together from the divorces and remarriages and blended families that nowadays make genealogical charts resemble a New York City subway map. I found it harder to tell her with each passing year. There were moments that I veered close to blurting out the truth, to coming clean with Noa, but I always choked. More maturity meant more questions. Like any parent, I wanted to shield my daughter from pain — a hard thing to do when having to recount the late-night phone call to my home in Mexico City that informed me of my first husband’s death. And the frantic attempts to get to Honduras to retrieve his remains before the government interred him there. And the interminable flight back to the States with his body stowed at my feet on the floor of a small plane. And the semi-falling-apart afterward when my editors, very thoughtfully, transferred me to Beirut — then in the throes of a brutal civil war — to recover. To say nothing of fending off bizarre invitations from men like the putative Polish shipping agent who kept asking me to go on a picnic — because who wouldn’t want to sit outside on a blanket amid the debris of blown-up buildings and downed pylons, breathing the fresh scent of newly exploded shells and listening to the pleasant whistle of missiles flying overhead while grieving? Nope, not a tale you want to tell your kid. Better just to bury it all. And while we’re at it: When, exactly, post–Big Bird, is the right moment to try to make sense of the senseless to a child? Especially when it’s not something contemporary, demanding an immediate explanation. Part of my reluctance was surely to spare myself from having to relive the experience. Another part, magical thinking: If I didn’t speak of it, the tragedy will never have happened. At least not in Noa’s world. It had taken me a long time to learn how to live with the pain of loss and lost love. It took me even longer to agree to marry Dennis, a diplomat I met when I was transferred back to the States. Terrified of chancing another marriage, I told Dennis I would gladly live with him in sin forever. But no wedding. Until one day it occurred to me that, married or not, my love for him would always put me at risk of being hurt again. Because — and here comes the truism, obvious to most other sentient beings — life is all about risk. Everything from driving the interstate to eating fast food to bringing a child into our crazed world involves risk. Risk, and the belief (or even just the hope) that we can rise and love again after being beaten by the odds — precisely the sort of lessons I could/should have been imparting to my daughter. “I’m truly sorry,” I said to Noa. “It’s a difficult subject to talk about, and I guess I didn’t know how.” And for the time being, we left it at that. *** Fast-forward several years: another Sunday, another batch of pizza dough. It’s the summer that Noa is leaving, having finished high school and deferred her entrance to college. She’s going abroad to do a gap year of community service. She stands poised on the brink of her real life, and it’s sad and sweet and exciting all rolled into one. It’s also scary; proud as I am, I’m obviously worried about her heading off to parts unknown. We’re trying to squeeze in as many of our little family’s sentimental rituals as possible before she leaves. After I’ve baked the pizza, Noa, Dennis, and I settle in to eat and watch television together: another Sunday tradition. The program is one of those ludicrously stylish British dramas whose writing and language never fail to captivate. But this particular episode contains a scene I didn’t see coming: a searing recitation by a woman whose life has been destroyed by the murder of a family member. Her poignant, almost unhinged accounting of the desolation she feels, of the utter futility of her post-loss existence, is a sucker punch to my heart. This hasn’t happened in years. I can barely breathe. Afterward, Noa finds me in my bedroom. “Why are you crying?” she asks. “I don’t know. Something about the woman’s story really hit home.” “But you’re not that woman!” Noa protests. “You rebuilt your life. You fell in love again. You got married. You had me.” Never underestimate the capacity of children to understand the universe — and to parse their parents' place within it. Since our initial exchange on that other, long-ago Sunday, Noa has asked only the occasional question about my earlier life. We’ve talked of it in a mostly desultory fashion; she never seemed to want too many additional details. And I, following the sex-talk stratagem of responding only to what is queried, never volunteered superfluous information. And yet, she got it. Completely. In the same way that, at a very young age — like all kids — she figured out which of her parents was the one to hit up for ice skates, which one to complain to about the math teacher. All those dim-witted years of avoiding the topic of my past, then tiptoeing around it once she found out? That was my problem, not hers. Somewhere along the way, she intuitively grasped the essential lesson: that with grit and resilience, anything is possible — even love. Especially love. And, of course, pizza on Sundays. Lynda Schuster is a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the author of the memoir Dirty Wars and Polished Silver: The Life and Times of a War Correspondent Turned Ambassatrix. | | | | |  Illustration by Anna Strain | Tameka* was a high school student who was enrolled in one of those special programs for delinquent students. She’d arrive at noon and leave by three and would be on campus with no books and no backpack. Tameka had only a pencil in one hand and three sheets of folded paper in the other. All of it — school and these instruments — was a weighty load for her to carry. I was an eleventh-grader with a different kind of load. I carried my life in my backpack — 25 extra pounds of textbooks, notepads, pencils, tampons, snacks, and my stories — all on my shoulders, already weighing on me. And on Fridays and after school, we’d lose those burdens and dance in the outdoor lunch area together. Always hip-hop, always jumping and swirling, rolling and pop-locking, our scrunchied ponytails swinging in brush strokes, painting musical notes in the air. So I was surprised to see Tameka one Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. I had arrived early for basketball practice and found her walking through our dance space, carrying a large tree branch. “Hey, Meka,” I said. She seemed extraordinarily happy to see me, hugs and smiles, a departure from the serious expressions we’d make during our dance-offs, when we’d talk to each other saying, “Gurl, this …” and “Gurl, that …” We were from the suburbs and learned how to speak that way from watching the movie New Jack City, the same way the white kids had. Tameka told me she was looking for Darnell. Saying his name made her suddenly angry. That’s when I noticed her gold hoop earrings were already taken off and her braids were pulled back into her dance-off ponytail. She said, “Grab a stick and come with us.” When she said us, Heather and Kristy came from another part of the lunch area and joined us there — Heather, a redhead, and Kristy, a blonde. They had already picked out their own large sticks. “What are y’all doing?” I said. “We’re gonna beat his ass,” Tameka said. “Then we’re going to beat Mr. L’s* ass.” “Coach?” I said. Darnell was often getting expelled and suspended, fighting and bullying people, but Mr. L was the track coach and people liked him — students and faculty. He was one of the most popular and dedicated teachers at the high school. He’d take students home from school when their parents no-showed or were coming too late from work. None of us ever had to sit alone in the dark waiting to be picked up. “Here,” Tameka said, “take my stick. I’ll find another one.” I held her tree branch loosely in my hand as she searched the dry patches next to the lunch area. I waited for her, bounced my backpack higher over my shoulders. “You’re seriously going to beat down Coach?” I said. “And Darnell,” she said. “He messed with Kristy’s sister.” “Shouldn’t we just tell the school dean? I can tell my counselor, Ms. B.” “Does that mean you’re not coming?” Tameka said. Her expression transformed into her dance-off mask. “I have to go to practice,” I said, handing back her branch, foreseeing a consequence to my own safety elsewhere, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said, “I don’t want to get dropped from the team.” “Come on,” she told the others. “Let’s wait for them on the track field. They both go that way from the parking lot.” After that day, I didn’t see any of them for months. Darnell I saw the next day, his eye bruised, his elbows scraped, still talking mess to everybody, especially intimidating the girls with what he thought were gifts to us: promises and stories about the feats of his penis. As for Mr. L, I heard through the grapevine that a complaint had been filed against him by a student I hadn’t met and that he had claimed his accusers were liars, problem children, and whores, and a few had tried to attack him in the parking lot. Those students were expelled, and Mr. L went back to work. I’d go on to transfer schools and graduate. And I no longer wonder what happened to the men in this story. I wonder about the women. Including those like me, who never spoke up back then. I think about how he asked me to watch him touch himself. “Just watch,” he said. I think about Tameka and Kristy, who my other school friends have not seen in twenty years. I want to find them and applaud them for using what they had to defend themselves and other women. I don’t support physical violence. That’s not what I mean. I support self-defense and these women who fought back after being victimized, who were ignored by school officials, by family and even friends, and who used one of the tools at their disposal when their voices were not enough. As women, wherever we are, we all have something available to us — a tool or talents as unique as each of us are, and a voice and a time to use it … even if that time is not in line with others, even when there is no trending hashtag. Take care of yourself and be safe. And we must claim our strengths with boldness and choose our talents as tools and nurture them. For me, those talents include creative writing, parenting, teaching, and my faith. I list faith as a talent because faith, too, is a choice. One that requires imagination, like artistry. And all good artistry, no matter how bizarre, conveys the truth. Oprah once said that truth is our most powerful tool. And courage. The courage to risk the little we have or use the little we find — like a fallen branch — in order to effect positive change. The news about Harvey Weinstein had just broken when I was in was in the mountains of Northern California with Buddhists. Tameka and Kristy were in the back of my mind then, and the idea for Drunk Girls Bible Study podcast came to me. It was such a small thing, I thought, a podcast, like a tear in the ocean. But I had a revelation or, some might say, a dream — mine tend to move me. In the dream, I was in my writing room, and there with me was my good friend Shaherah White, who is the daughter of the late, great Barry White, and there, also, was Angelique Ehat, a veteran women’s church leader. I hardly knew Angelique then. I had seen her at church functions, heard her speak once — four years earlier — but for over a year, few people had seen her. After more than twenty years in church ministry, she had disappeared and gone into seclusion like Yoda. I was shaking when I called her but felt encouraged by the yes I’d gotten from Shaherah, who said, “Real talk about the Bible? Hell yes! You have to call Angelique!” So when Angelique picked up the phone, I told her about this dream and that I knew it sounded insane, but I was going to transform my writing room for a podcast, and Drunk Girls Bible Study was going to be riotous and not religious, a place of empowerment for women. For all women, Christian or not, a place to have conversations about faith and womanhood based on Biblical principles and stories. A place to rebuild each other, to encourage each other, to stand, to pray, to act, to lay our burdens down like the site of an after-school dance-off. She said, “I think this is the call I’ve been waiting for.” We launch March 13, 2018, on iTunes, and our Kickstarter campaign ends on March 18, and the three of us will be carrying big sticks. *Names have been changed, because ultimately it is their story to tell. Like yours is yours. I am only carrying a puzzle piece that I lay down now to honor the legacy they left, and also to honor our strong high school students around the nation who are, right now, deciding to no longer tolerate the violence against their bodies (or perpetrate it). I hear you and am so proud of you. Natashia Deón is an NAACP Image Award Nominee and the author of the critically acclaimed novel GRACE, which was named a top book of 2016 by the New York Times and won the 2017 American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award for Best Debut Fiction. GRACE is available in paperback now, and you can subscribe to Drunk Girls Bible Study on iTunes or Google Music Play. | | | | |  Illustration by Ghazaleh Rastgar | PISCES
(February 19 to March 20)
Happy birthday, Pisces! One thing that’s both annoying and amazing is that we already contain the answers inside of us. This month, instead of seeking them frantically, look for clues that can help you peel back your ego and remember what you already know. ARIES
(March 21 to April 19)
We can’t all be Stevie Nicks. Some of us are Christine McVie. I’m not saying that you are not Stevie Nicks, but if you ever feel like Christine McVie and wish you were Stevie Nicks, ask yourself why that’s so important to you. TAURUS
(April 20 to May 20)
Sometimes beauty is truth and truth is beauty. And sometimes beauty is a total lie. This month, be extra careful when dealing with aesthetic intoxication, feelings of envy, and any assumptions based on externals. GEMINI
(May 21 to June 20)
We all leave the house late sometimes and want to kill the person who is in our way. Of course, that person isn’t actually in our way — they are just living, and we are the ones who are late. This month, take all delays as opportunities to exist exactly where you are and even try to enjoy them. CANCER
(June 21 to July 22)
Feelings aren’t facts, except for when they are a direct product of our intuition. Then they are more factual than anything. This month, look to refine your connection to your intuition. The first step is by never just shoving a feeling away. LEO
(July 23 to August 22)
What are some things you say you will never do, places where you would never live, jobs you would never have, or behaviors that you would never enact? Do these nos and nevers stem from deep-seated values or merely ego preservation? If they do stem from values, ask yourself where these values came from. VIRGO
(August 23 to September 22)
Heaven is right now or it isn’t real. This is not to say that anticipation itself isn’t heaven. Or that sadness is not its own form of heaven. One thing about the Christian idea of Heaven is that people are chill with eternity. Same with the Buddhist idea of Nirvana. But what about the eternity of right now? LIBRA
(September 23 to October 22)
Survival is important. If we don’t survive, we can’t enjoy life. But sometimes, as we get older, the survival mechanisms of our youth are no longer necessary. This month, look at the ways some of your oldest forms of self-preservation might get in the way of your enjoying life. SCORPIO
(October 23 to November 21)
Euphoric recall is the process by which we remember certain times, people, and experiences in our lives as better than they actually were. We do this when we remember the good and block out the bad: in love, work, and places. This month, before you make any decisions, consider the impact of euphoric recall — especially if it’s a decision involving somewhere you’ve been before. SAGITTARIUS
(November 22 to December 21)
What would it be like to take a break from entertaining people, from being who you think they want you to be, from working so hard when it comes to others? A month is a long time, but try it for just one day — or even an hour. See if you are not less exhausted. CAPRICORN
(December 22 to January 19)
What is it about time travel, flight, and invisibility that appeals to us as humans? For me, it’s a longing to transcend the mundane, a hunch that there must be something bigger than what I am seeing. This month, instead of regretting the fact that you do not have magical powers (whichever ones you desire), know that you can go inside yourself for that transcendence. AQUARIUS
(January 20 to February 18)
Be honest about your mistakes this month. You might think that errors need to be covered up to save face, to save a job, or to save our relationship. But the truth is going to do a lot more for you than any elaborate schemes. You can lie again in April. Melissa Broder is the author of the forthcoming novel The Pisces (Hogarth, May 2018), four collections of poems, including Last Sext (Tin House 2016), and So Sad Today, a book of essays from Grand Central. | | | | | | | | |
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