Lifting the Burden of Shame

1997-2017:: in which I am a dystopia As the unexamined traumas lodged in my muscles, bones, and organs metastasize into a laundry list of erratic pain, illness, and life-altering shifts, I find myself in one waiting room after another, filling out the same information (and lack thereof): what are your current symptoms? how long have you been experiencing these symptoms? ... Read More »

By the age of 6, I had been to see more psychiatrists than I ever wanted to – 6,10,15 – I’ve lost count. So many faces they just disappear. My parents searched far and near for help but all they got was sorry there is nothing for her here. Unnecessary pain and suffering dominated my life for years because the ... Read More »

My entire life, I got sick very easily. Always something wrong with my stomach, complaining of nausea constantly. As a kid, tests were run, though my mother made sure we all had a healthy diet, doctors thought I had one illness or another. At around 11 years old, my mother called me into her bedroom. Before I was blindfolded with ... Read More »

Remember in high school when you would break up with someone and still have to see them every day? same class, same parties, work together on projects?. Crying in the playground about a relationship that will never be. Remember in the beginning how dreadful that was? … well, that’s me at 35 years old. It’s all the same, just now ... Read More »

I didn’t have a word for it as a child, but it’s as clear as day now….the word was: shame. I have carried that feeling with me for as far back as I can remember being alive, and by five years old it had already begun to strip me of my childhood. By definition, shame is a feeling of humiliation or ... Read More »

I’ve never been good enough to be me. I’ve been told.  Confusing isn’t it? I am a professional scuba diver of the depths of the soul.  What?!? What I mean is, I spend a lot of time thinking, digging within, trying to find answers, making sense of the world, in a quest for truth, our connectedness and more importantly what ... Read More »

You’re made of so much beauty, But it seems that you forgot, When you decided that you were defined, By all the things you’re not.                             ~e.h I have been brewing this idea of photographing my body for a long time. A few weeks shy of my 42nd birthday, I arranged for a “boudoir” photo-shoot, truly an empowering experience to ... Read More »

  It was an unspoken vow. It just sort of happened. I got pregnant, then married, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and then we divorced. She was just a toddler. That’s when I married my three-year-old little girl. One of the vows that I made to her when she left my womb was that I would always put ... Read More »

My mother was a virgin when she met my father. I remember her drilling this to anyone who would listen. She was his first virgin. Maybe she was his only virgin. She bore him two children, girls. I am one of them, their eldest.   She was also one of his mistresses. I am the daughter of a mistress. My mother strived to be seen as una “mujer decente”. ... Read More »

For the past twenty-five years I’ve worked on Wall Street, a place that was very foreign to me in my childhood, but one that has been such a big part of who I am as an adult, and one that has driven my mission and work in the Latino community. Unlike many of my colleagues, I didn’t have a formal ... Read More »