It's not even a complete sentence, being a woman. When you are born female, you have made a mistake, an error in judgement before it even exists, because it was a mistake you made when you weren't even a fully formed human yet. Just cells dividing, commas forming an endless sentence; there are too many of them and yet you are not enough, never enough.

I'd like to think that this is what I was thinking before my breast exam, but alas, it was not.

I told a doctor, a medically trained professional, that I had a lump on my chest, on my ribcage, and that I wanted it looked at. In that moment, the word "uncomfortable" became a complete sentence. The doctor, a male, looked at me like I had just asked him to strip, or maybe I had revealed an embarrassing secret to him, telling him I was a woman.

It's in my medical chart, I promise. A big "F" next to my name, the grade I was given before I took my first breath in this world.

OK, he says. I need to get a nurse in here, as a chaperone.

Ah, yes, a chaperone. Lovely - a nurse, a woman, who can also watch as a doctor loses some dignity in helping me seek a professional opinion on my physical well-being.

Maybe, if my tone wasn't sarcastic, I could have told him that and he might have felt better about this experience.

It was agony, for both of us. That poor nurse. It was so awkward that I almost burst out laughing. But I've learned that laughing can make a lot of situations worse, like a sentence punctuated with too many commas written in permanent ink, the pause in between each word a life sentence, suspending it and and suffocating it.

Maybe if I had told the doctor that, he would have felt better about doing his job.

Then, I learned that breast exams are not, in fact, his job. He told me that next time, I should go to a gynecologist. An OB-GYN, for people like me, half the world's population; they are considered specialists, when there are dozens of specialists, just not specifically for fifty percent of the planet.

Sorry I'm female, I wanted to say. Let me go back to before my cells started dividing, when it wasn't too late for Y chromosome to make me the correct, less uncomfortable, gender for this particular field of medicine. For you, specifically. General medicine, which I assumed you were trained in, hopefully thoroughly. For I was at a Primary Care Office, but I guess women are Secondary.

That is sarcasm, but if it's true, is it still sarcasm? Or does it become like the awkwardness, felt distinctly by everyone in the room, sentences that have the comma in the wrong place and everyone is looking at you for an explanation.

Why are you here, the awkward silence asked. The comma doesn't belong there, it never needed to exist to begin with. Go away.

After the doctor finished explaining that he didn't "do" women's medicine - I mean, what else could he have meant? he was literally implying that - I said to him, "I thought OB-GYN's were for "this general area" (I pointed at my lap).

No, the doctor said. They're for everything.

My entire gender, shrunk to fit into one field of medicine, when there are dozens of fields of medicine.

Then he told me that maybe I should try wearing a more supportive bra.

Any questions? he asked. All done. Thanks for coming in, but next time, you could spare us both the embarrassment, the awkwardness, by going to the correct place. The place where only women go, like how I imagine men go to specialists to get their testicles checked, and have prostate exams, and exist in the world of men, where they weren't created a mistake when their cells first started dividing.

I'm all done with the sarcasm now, I promise. But I'm still not convinced he wasn't joking, but then I got home, and realized that what had bothered me the most was how unbothered he seemed by the lump on my ribcage. Remember that? Yeah, me neither. Another women's health issue to be ignored, forgotten, erased because the embarrassment was too great and the doctor wasn't comfortable with a body that had fused with the wrong chromosome, that had been born in the maternity ward where being a woman is relevant and they are not the awkward commas.

You do not get notified when someone unfollows you. But I want a reason. There should be a pop up window that says, "Be honest, why did you unfollow this person?" I could collect the responses like data points, but maybe some of them were from internet robots, and the responses weren't real. I start to wonder if I'm real, what it means when someone clicks a button and I disappear, forever, from their feed.

I like to scroll through Facebook, where I have an account only in order to read the comment sections of politically loaded posts. Some people might call that being an "internet troll." But hey, they posted it. I'm just an innocent bystander, reading it.

I never comment. Complete silence from my little computer, a rectangle I carry around with me like it means anything except that I'm being tracked by Apple, Inc.

I judge them, silently. I am the same person who unfollowed me, the infinite loop of social media. People in the real world can't just press "unfollow" and walk away from someone talking to them. That would be considered rude, but on the internet, you can do that with one click. You have been silenced.

I see people's comments and wonder if they know that they are only one of billions of Facebook users, that they are a single grain of sand in an hourglass that makes Mark Zuckerberg another dollar. If they know that their iPhone is listening to them, pushing targeted ads at them, and they don't question it. That Facebook, and all social media, are constantly changing to better suck us into it, to make us addicted.

Maybe my silence is just as toxic, my laughter at my fellow Americans on Facebook only heard by Apple, Inc., and then later I get a push ad from a mental health agency. Go figure.

But, jokes on them - I can't afford healthcare, like every other American. It's funny, how we throw insults at each other online when most people probably couldn't define the term "algorithm" to save their lives. Who are you talking to, really, on the internet?

Likewise, who are you choosing to listen to?

And maybe that's the point. I'm laughing at Facebook posts daily and the billionaires know that they got me, hook, line, and sinker.

Just because I'm only listening, doesn't mean I am not a part of the conversation about social media.

A single stroke of paint on canvas. One ball in a hoop in athletics. A word falling out of our mouths, expelling carbon dioxide, invisible, but altering every interaction we have afterwards. I like to think of myself as a writer. The only source of oxygen I have is the written word, hoping it makes me permanent, memorable, alive after I am dead.

On March 11, 2020, WHO declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. I was in a mental hospital and didn't have internet access, or any kind of canvas. I slept on a cold cot for three nights, which eventually cost me $20,000; in America, health is for those who can afford it, and the rest of us go bankrupt, wondering later if it's a rigged system that only some of us were born to win at.

The nurse told me she couldn't find a vein for my routine blood test. I wondered, if mental illness could be found in a single antibody, would we have a vaccine for it?

When I was released from the hospital I started writing and the words didn't stop coming. Was this surviving, me evolving, or a new era entirely? In the modern day, we turn on our smartphones and scroll towards the news that we believe in. But that's a contradiction, just by definition. It's a loop that we buy into, like our own stream of consciousness. Facts exist, beliefs do not. When you are triaged in the ER for being depressed, the doctor tells you it's all in your head, that who you think you are is not a thought at all, just an illness.

A feeling is, ultimately, an antibody. The world didn't have them yet to fight COVID. On March 11th, 2020, I would wake up every few hours from sleeping, living for the single second upon awakening when I wasn't alive or dead, just a vein that was being poked at without living memory to penetrate it, no conclusive results yet.

Maybe it was on March 11th 2020, that I realized that if I didn't stop it from happening, the virus would multiply, my future one of the DSM-V and doctors telling me it was because my mother hadn't loved me properly.

I didn't want to be a victim, so when I learned that viruses literally alter our RNA, I opened my laptop and decided to save myself in the only way I knew how: by sharing how I felt. Suddenly, through posting my writing, the antibodies were people seeing me, not knowing me based on my medical history, but for the story I was telling. I could literally write my life into a new genetic code that for the first time, I was in charge of spinning.

Vaccines are currently being disputed in America. A future famous writer has yet to be identified. What is fact, where is the vein of life, and how can I turn on that oxygen supply, make it last forever?

Do birthmarks need to be physical, to be considered something that marks us as unique, as special? They say DNA is something we can see under a microscope. Is this the birthmark that matters most? Dementia, Bipolar Disorder, Addiction - these are the freckles, the lines in our skin that we are born with, just not immediately apparent to the doctor pulling us out of uterine darkness.

My DNA snuck up on me, the folds of my brain pulled back when I was a teenager, perhaps god was angry and needed me to be fifteen forever. My birthmark is a dark one, one I had to see a doctor for, like skin cancer festering when we think nothing can kill us.

Perhaps birthmarks come later, and what we are born with is only the blueprint, the blindfold that fate takes off of us as we get older.

It's easy to blame relatives, enemies, politicians for many mental health crises. Blame the weather, your education, the suburbs. Who put the knife in my back, you may ask. Why am I like this? Sometimes the marks on our bodies can be removed with lasers, or therapy. Sometimes we are asked to point out what makes us unique as individuals and the answer is mental, generational trauma fixed in an endless formation of cells, causing us to become a battleground we did not ask for.

Susan from accounting asked me why I have tattoos, when they are permanent, cannot be removed. I asked her why she has children, if it was societal pressure or an actual desire to break the cycle. Maybe the condom broke, maybe I'm just trying to express myself, create a birthmark I chose as an adult.

The blueprint of who we are may be embedded in our DNA, but just as a laser can remove a tattoo we once wanted, maybe birthmarks go backwards.

We choose what stays with us.

Recently I've been digging into my memory of college, a gravesite I haven't touched in a decade plus.

It was an all-women's college. Navigating the social world of it turned out sour, like a bad sourdough starter.

I don't remember much of it. But recently they've been coming back at 2AM, memories I thought I'd obliterated.

It is a kind of oblivion.

I've decided that girl wasn't me. But what if she's still trapped inside of me, screaming?

I've gotten into outer space recently. Black hole videos, specifically.

There's this thing with black holes called the event horizon. No light escapes it. We can't even see it. If something passes through it, we see it in space, suspended forever in our vision - but it already disappeared, an illusion. It is time bending.

One day, the universe will no longer be able to sustain itself. It will die out, like dreams, and just as unexplainable.

I don't even think my memories of college would make it into space dust.

The girl inside of me, the college version, has already passed through the event horizon. But when is she gone, can that moment please come?

Once a human being passes through the event horizon, they become particles. Every atom of their physical being separates. They are stretched thin, in a long line of their atoms, one after the other in one long string of them.

I like to think of the college version of myself passing through the black hole, after hovering over it. Disappearing but still visible to outside observers, billions of years later. She becomes only an illusion.

The second you pass the event horizon, you die. No one could survive it.

My memory of college is a black hole. Once I start thinking about it, ruminating on it, my memories instantly die, and become atoms that no longer make up a whole.

My memories disappear into something physicists can't even fathom.

If we only become atoms, the concept of us having "souls" and "memories" wasn't even real to begin with.

It has become my escape mechanism, to think of this.

I forgive myself in each atom, over and over again, like they are one long string of rosary beads. But I can't pray, not technically, because I'm no longer a person, I'm a concept, just like praying is a concept. God doesn't exist here, and no one is left to judge me.

I love that.

All that matters, in the end, is that I can be broken apart enough to finally not have to contain myself all at once.

In the end, my memories of college are atoms that disintegrate instantly somewhere inside our universe. Or maybe they have already disintegrated. There's no knowing.

My college memories are suspended forever in the space time continuum, gone even as they seem to exist - but they don't. They're already dead.

I think I can live with that. Maybe I already know that.

And that is what finally helps me fall back asleep at 2AM.

I sat in on the interview. The people we were interviewing were all girls, no guys. It was for a receptionist position at a famous hospital in Boston.

I was moving up in the ranks because my previous coworker, let's call her Ava, was leaving. I got to take her superior seat in the receptionist area.

The last girl we interviewed was definitely not my favorite candidate.

My manager hired her.

She loved to talk. I mean, this girl was on fire with stories. She'd come from a lower position on the floor above us in the hospital. If I were to be unkind, I'd say she "yapped."

She talked about her love interest(s), her family, Iran. Her family had eleven daughters and one son. Her parents had escaped Iran for a better life in America.

That should have been enough to impress me. Instead, for about a month straight, she would update me on her sister.

Her sister was deeply in love. She was pregnant. She was holding out hope for the father of her unborn child, desperately wanting him to love her back. It was unrequited love and my coworker, if talking can be measured in meters, was on her tenth kilometer.

Then came the final update: my coworker told me that she had finally convinced her sister to get an abortion.

She told her sister, "He doesn't love you. He never will - don't trap him."

My coworker was five years younger than me - and I mean, I was young then, too. I think I actually turned my head all the way around to look at her as she recounted the abortion itself.

She said, "I have never seen so much blood in my life." She had held her sister's hand through the entire abortion. Her sister had screamed in pain, and she held on tighter.

Then she took a bite of her apple, shrugged, and answered one of our never ending phone calls.

I think she must have been about twenty at the time. Her sister was older than her. She had held her older sister's hand and told her it was the best thing she could do for herself. Don't trap him. Having his kid isn't going to make him love you.

If anything, he'll resent you.

My coworker turned back around to look at me. She applied her shiny pink lip gloss that made her long brown hair look like a halo.

"Anyway, I told her to let go of the guy. I mean, he clearly wasn't interested."

I might mention here that we worked in the pediatrics unit. Later that day, I was taking a phone call from a patient's parent/grandparent/guardian, and she walked up behind me. She cracked a joke she knew would make me sputter with laughter. She leaned in and whispered it so only I could hear.

I laughed so hard I couldn't speak. I hung up on the parent/grandparent/guardian. So unprofessional.

I turned back around to face her. We were both trying to stifle giggles, to the point that it sounded like we were choking.

"I'm so glad we hired you," I said.

"Are you kidding?" she said. "This job is just to get me to the next one."

Then she smacked her glossy pink lips together and smiled at me, and in that moment, I wished we'd been sisters.

I named my son

"Ernest Hope Hemingway"

because when I adopted him

I wandered the streets of Berkeley

finding bookstores and buying

fiction for cheap in 2020;

his previous owner

telling me she'd named him

"Hope," because he was

their family favorite, during Covid -

as if names, and made-up stories

could save us from

a world gone completely insane,

which as it turns out, they did

I would go home and feed him

watching him devour

every square inch of my apartment

while running my fingers along

the spines of books that had

existed for decades, like my copy

of The Sun Also Rises,

by Ernest Hemingway,

that I had bought in Boston,

when "hope" wasn't a word

I'd use to describe anything,

moving me to California,

where my son loves me

more innocently, more fully, than

almost any real person

besides my husband (amongst others),

despite any virus existing -

Ernest (Hope) Hemingway

makes the madness interesting

his little sister, Nora,

is our newest addition -

and like literature,

she will be the gift

that keeps on giving

despite it all, despite everything

I moved to California

so I could eat “In N Out“

in the parking lot

under palm trees that are

technically dying, and not living

but there’s something horrific

about opening up a ketchup packet

and watching it explode

all over your white dress,

the adrenaline of it, the equivalent

of a bloody mess that bleach can’t fix

what have you done,

you think, moving thousands of

miles west

for a burger that’s just average,

the outline of your past a stain

that’s still visible, the “In N Out” logo fading to grey inside your mouth, colorless

I did it all to escape autumn

all that orange and yellow,

the blood red trees a reminder

of what kills us

when we let it linger

it wasn't hard to find her

on the internet

I used her first name

followed by what she's famous for

it's been only six years

but I can still remember

her pixie cut, her coming out

to a room full of strangers

in a city I don't really remember

with a winter that found me

taking off my scarf, dismantling

myself in front of people

who I'll never know

outside of a single room, in a

city where the snow hit me

like gunfire, each snowflake

a unique bullet meant to kill

we all had our seats,

every week, it never changed

when she talked

she was so out of breath

it was like she was trying

to run from her own thoughts

group therapy is interesting

people come and go, but

I'll always remember her,

how the winter seemed to

contain her in a snow globe

frozen, lost in a storm only

she knew of

I hope she found her voice

one she could use outside of

that room, one that can hold her

and keep her safe from the cold

I write about him sometimes

how he came to group therapy

soaking wet, his button down shirt

soaked through with sweat

the Star of David

hanging from his neck

like the parental expectations

that seemed to

perpetually set him back

mid-twenties, like the rest of us

he was always late

worked some corporate job

and would tell us

that he broke down

on the highway

while driving his car

we would all nod in sympathy

and then he mentioned

the panic attack, the pure

adrenaline that kicked in

when he veered off

onto the shoulder

playing rap music so loud that

his speakers blew out

trying to distract himself

from the sheer hell of himself

I think of him now

maybe as an example

of how we can contain ourselves

so well, until the breaking

point, anxiety like

traffic that doesn't slow

panic seeping into

the very fiber of our clothes