Table of Contents
Welcome to Cinncerely: Postcards from the Void. Here's an overview of the essays I've written so far.
I was thinking it could be cute to create a TOC! I realize my titles aren't always obvious indicators as to what a given piece may be about. And since I tend to publish essays in segments, it makes sense to me to lay out the sections here. I will be updating this document regularly and keeping it as a pinned post. (I also won't list *every* single essay I write here, just the ones belonging to a clear theme.)
Thank you for reading! Essays on Memory
once a year, i am loved
Under my bed, I keep a box tucked full of cards and letters, all of them handwritten. I call it The Letterbox (original, I know). Most of the notes in my Letterbox are birthday cards because I like to hold on to all the evidence I can collect that someone once recognized my humanity and shared a little bit of theirs with me.
This essay is about my love of birthdays, reflecting on past celebrations and how I’ve grown into myself over the years.
the ones we tell and the ones we keep
My mother was born in 1966 in the island nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, an archipelago located in the Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean. She grew up poor. Her father was a violently abusive alcoholic who couldn’t read, but I’ve been told he was very good at math and a skilled fisherman. His boat, rotting and faint of color, sits parked in a …
An essay about my mother, my grandmother, and the power of storytelling.
Soft Launching Your Rebrand Tonite, Queen? 👀
I was assigned Eldest Daughter at birth. A documented phenomenon, “Eldest Daughter Syndrome” has become a bit of a trope, almost a cliche in online circles (and maybe the real world, too). As is often the case, my status as an eldest daughter was perhaps one of the earliest things to define me.
Now that I’m all grown up, sometimes I wonder: would my younger self be proud of me? I kept a diary blog as a teen, and I had a bunch of expectations for what kind of person I’d grow up to be. I do a comparison in this essay to see how I measured up.
Essays on Fantasy
Intersectional Femininity in the Queer Eye of the Beholder
As of late, there is closer speculation and scrutiny on how womanhood and femininity are defined and understood. Recently it was described to me as a “political act,” to be a woman in this moment. I objected to this. But maybe it’s futile to resist; the politics of simply being are often inherent to the times. Meh, so be it.
Here I write about the performative aspects of femininity and my opinions on gender. I also talk about The Female Gaze, but like, in a queer way.
This One Weird Trick Allows Anyone to Be A Magical Girl
For all the fuss about style and overconsumption and fashion trends and all the cores, I don’t believe many people truly care about “fashion” in a way that matters. Most folks wear either black every day or a palette of neutrals. They own multiple pairs of jeans. Their typical outfits impart a lack of imagination—but that’s the point: not wanting to stand out or draw in too much attention, they dress primarily for comfort.
There’s a lot of commentary on how to figure out developing your personal style. My advice? Pick a story and stick to it. My fashion is centered around fairy vibes and being a pretty princess in pink. Critics claim hyper-femininity is “infantilizing” but sometimes girls just wanna be kawaii and I’ll die on that hill.
toy with her
Sexual fantasy underwrites several social scripts, often to the detriment of the role player. This is the inherent precarity of desirability: To be desired is to be at risk.
Being pretty is fun and good but here I reflect on the darker implications of have a fantasy projected onto you and feeling compelled to play along. This is a prose poem interlaced with a few stats and quotes about men who solicit sex workers, because I think they’re a group that lean into fantasy most of all.
Essays on Pain
flavors of pain
He led me up to his apartment which, to my horror, was entirely coated in dust. The coffee table, the dishes in his sink, every surface of the furniture lay covered with a thin gray film, suggesting that nothing had been touched perhaps in years. “This was my childhood home,” he explained. I smiled nervously.
So remember that time I let an old man pour hot wax on me? Yeah.
the art of suffering
If a poverty-stricken, dumpster-dwelling, roadkill-eating high school senior managed to still get straight A’s and miraculously landed acceptances into multiple Ivy Leagues, a news network would publicize that story as a feel good moment, as proof of the value of “discipline” and “resilience” under impossible conditions. Thousands of people would go on …
No pain no gain, am I right? I might be wrong. In this essay I speculate about why we seem to live in a society that loves stories about “starting from the bottom” while looking at the bottom with contempt.
all the times i dreamt of dying
I was in middle school when I first began to have suicidal ideations. As with most bullied children, this was a constant rumination of mine.
Sad children dream of death and go online to bond over being unhappy with other unhappy people. Artists create works that make suffering look beautiful and these circulate online too. Only in horror films though, does the ugly truth come out. Please be advised that this post mentions: suicidal ideation, self-harm, violence, abuse, school shooters, horror films, cults, and my own experiences with depression.
i who have never known pain - a companion piece
When a person is actively living through a traumatic event, they may not even recognize it for what it is at the time. Maybe only in hindsight, maybe only through exposure to a perspective outside of their own, do they realize they have suffered. Maybe they never realize, and remain in denial, and the denial is what makes it possible for them to move forward at all.
I wanted to work through some of the underdeveloped ideas from the “all the times i dreamt of dying” piece. in this one, i expand on a few points and reflect more on my own relationship to trauma and healing.