to have forgotten everything

whales, women, and what's worth celebrating

photo by quinn netfield

Note: This issue is best viewed on a computer screen. The poem will be suuuuper teeny and hard to read on a phone.

If you know Joanna Newsom’s music and you know me even a little bit, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that I’m a longtime fan. Newsom’s lyrics, like her compositions, are complex, wistful, and deeply weird. For two decades her work has been a significant influence on my writing, although not so nakedly that anyone might notice.

At least, not until “Colleen.”

I must’ve heard this song when it was released in 2007, but I have no memory of it. I have no memory of lots of things.

Newsom’s song tells the story of someone who finds herself shoeless and disoriented, washed up on a strange beach in a strange land. She does her best to fit in, to behave as the women do, but her every effort fails. People ask her who she is, where she came from. Why she’s like this.

She has no answers for them; either she can’t remember, or she never knew.

But Colleen is not sorry about it. She knows the purposes of forgetting. How loving it can be. (And I was blessed among all women/ to have/ forgotten everything)

I’m not going to spoil the ending for you. You should listen. It is, in true Newsom form, folkloric, haunting, and startling to the last note.

Somehow (no memory of it, no memory at all) I encountered “Colleen” (again?) in early 2021. In the years between the song’s release and my (re?)discovery of it, I’d moved far away, to a town by the sea, and found myself a stranger in a strange place at the strangest possible time.

I’d begun questioning my relationship to womanhood.

I’d realized I was autistic, and that most people do not spend their young lives literally believing—or being treated like—they were born on the moon. (Where did you come from? Why are you like this?)

I’d experienced an assault that veiled my connection to the world, severed me from my body, and further widened the yawning chasms in my memory.

“Colleen” crashed down upon me, then. It picked me up like a mother, like a great wave.

This is what I wrote.

---

a lovely development

art by scarlet begonia

In 2017, bitch magazine published my essay about misdiagnosis and medical misogyny. The essay meant a lot to me, as did the publication. One of the biggest surprises and honors of my life has been discovering the ways in which that essay meant something to other people, too.

Scarlet Begonia is an artist who shares some of my medical experience. They recently reached out to let me know that my essay inspired them to make the collage shown above. The entire thing is brilliant, but my favorite element is the sickly-sweet, dripping pink—our doctors’ perceptions of femininity, coloring everything.

bitch magazine has, much to my great sorrow, gone under, which means that the essay is no longer online. If you’d like to read it, let me know and I’ll send you a copy.

---

---

tenderness homework

personal rule: if rainbow-making conditions arise, you run outside into the rain and go find that rainbow.

We’re going to do something a little different this month. Rather than curating a list of wacky holidays, I want to ask what makes a day special to you, and what you’ve wanted to celebrate recently. What, in other words, makes you feel tender toward existence?

If you want a bit more direction, I strongly recommend

Hayley Jay Croom

’s post on the Wheel of the Year:

This Wheel's on Fire

and

Ann Collins

on microseasons:

With Kind Hands

---

haunted forest (2024). art by me.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I am so, so glad you’re here.