Essays on cancer, identity, divorce, and the complicated freedom of starting over.
Unwritten Self is a personal storytelling blog about midlife reinvention. I write from a lived experience of surviving ovarian cancer, navigating divorce after more than 20 years, and coming to terms with my identity as an intersex woman with Swyer syndrome. I’m also an adoptee, a mother, and someone who’s had to rebuild more than once. These essays are where I untangle it all: identity, illness, family, grief, and choosing yourself after crisis.
Easter. Again.
Easter hit on what would have been my twenty-third wedding anniversary. I made a basket. Overslept. Did almost nothing by five o'clock. And spent the whole day trying to figure out why I felt like I had failed — when the real answer was harder than that.
The Cost of Compromise
At 18, I chose a college close to New York but not in it — close enough to feel safe, far enough to miss everything I wanted. It was the first of many quiet compromises that shaped the next 40 years.
The Earthquake Underneath
My divorce was finalized one day before my 22nd anniversary. That same week, an earthquake shook San Diego. Both felt the same—something cracking loose that had been building for a long time. I'm still under the desk. But I know I'll get up.
Midlife and the Unwritten Self
I've spent my life fulfilling roles. Daughter, wife, mother. I'm beginning to realize I've outgrown some of them. Sharon Blackie's Hagitude gave me language for what I'm standing in — the threshold between what was and what I haven't yet written.