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.
Where Shame Begins
I knew I was different long before I understood why. No puberty. No explanation. Just the slow, quiet certainty that something was wrong—and the shame that took root in that silence.
I Am Many Things
October 26, 2024 is Intersex Awareness Day. I am many things. I am intersex. And today, I'm saying it out loud.
Why I’m Really Doing This
Everyone loves a cancer survivor. But who loves a hermaphrodite? That question—the one I couldn't answer—kept me silent for 25 years. This is why I'm finally telling my story.
Good Catholic Kids
Birthdays and anniversaries put me in a funk. I'm always missing someone. Today is my parents' 63rd wedding anniversary — and I'm thinking about the roots I come from, the ones I'm still trying to make sense of.
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.