Friendship equals no appointment required.

I was fourteen years-old, singing and strumming away on my six-string acoustic guitar to the songs of the sixties and seventies limited to the aforementioned “Cocaine,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “House of the Rising Sun.” I had no idea Lola was a man and someone else was glad they were a man. I always tell people, “I’ve been to that desert. I’ve been on that horse and he did have a name, I just was never allowed to tell anyone.

I am a latchkey kid who gets relentlessly teased every day at school. I want to die. I try to overdose on four aspirin.

If you love me and I’m feeling sad, please buy me paper towels, preferably Bounty in a six-pack or greater. Having a cabinet full of paper towels gives me a feeling of abundance, so please do this for me if you love me. Won’t you? Paper towels equals happy Weird Girl.

Growing up with a feminist mother was confusing and, at times, felt simply abnormal. But if my mom wasn’t who she was, I wouldn’t be who I am. As matter of fact, women like my mother were the pioneers who taught many of us perseverance and endurance.

Live the journey, learn the lessons, regret not.

I come from a worried people. These people worry and are overly cautious. The worried people are very suggestive and read the side effects on every medication to make sure they experience all of them, even the side effects experienced by the placebo people. If it only happens in males, my female people will figure out a way to have that side effect, too. My people worry out of love, though.

There is a moment when you just know it and can’t deny it. It’s simply the irrefutable truth, and now you have to change the situation because it’s no longer working for you. Maybe you come to the realization gradually, or maybe you come to it like a nearly missed red light when you stomp on the brake, and it’s right there, unmistakable. It’s the moment when you realize there is only one cool person in the relationship or dating thingy, and it’s not the other person.

Living inside this head was a torture of endless looping thoughts and self-hatred. Like many women, my suffering manifested itself through my relationship with my body that transcended self-hatred into self-destruction. There’s no need to go into any more detail about what it was like. What I do want to offer is that there is hope.