Status Updates From Tissue

“…in a bid to cure my guilt, to scour it of its sting, I homed in on my relief instead. I was childless, liberated from responsibility, not needing to wrestle with the prospect of my life changing dramatically…spared from a great calamity. Relief, though - especially when grieving is intricate, complicated…Relief is there, like an angel on the opposite shoulder, to mollify guilt. To blunt its horns.”

“I was forced to reckon with my own standing, my own future. Forced to pat the thin walls of my rental, imagining the piercing cries of a child permeating the space. Compelled to look keenly at my spending, to consider the sustainability of my lifestyle; my concerns cushioned in the global economic and environmental ruin of the earth I occupy.”

“…the guilt I felt wasn't black and white, nor uncomplicated…we were raised to follow the narrative of life-college, marriage, career, children—as if this were the only story. My pregnancy, and subsequent abortion, was a blunt rejection of the kind of adulthood I was meant to aspire toward: that of security, certainty, conventionality.“

“The patriarchy decides what a good woman is— not a person, a woman—and if she hasn't been good, hasn't behaved, the life she hopes to excavate from her insides is instead to grow inside of her. Life being the punishment…against women and pregnant people whose own lives aren't deemed independently worthy of care…”

“I was wrong to say that my gynaecologist sowed the first seed of guilt. It had been sprouting, flourishing, for eons: rooted deeply in government policy; impassioned church sermons; mythic folklore; the begrudging eyes of disapproving doctors, parents, lovers, husbands.