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.
Peach Pie and Police Uniforms
I was 17 when I told my mother I didn't want her life. She didn't flinch. Twenty years after her death, I understand what she was actually doing at that ironing board. She wasn't disappearing. She was building everything.
Mr. Thirteen
Today my son turns 13. He's stepping into independence. I'm stepping away from everything that defined me. We're both on the edge of becoming — and I don't have a map for either journey.