gay-joan-of-arc

[gay-joan-of-arc]

Canned corn, pool cues, and my first taste of freedom

Whack Whack Crash! Sunlight streamed in through the rounded port windows, and the sailboat swayed gently from side to side. whackwhackwhack! I am sitting on the floor inside the boat, with a can of corn braced between my bare feet and a screwdriver in one hand, and a hammer in the other. Whack! The hammer pinches the side of my finger against the screwdriver and I drop both tools in…

[gay-joan-of-arc]

When You Leave Me

When You Leave Me

I am afraid I’ll lose you When you leave me When we argue and turn away I am afraid you’re not coming back When you leave me As I sit With your car fading down the road With my anger and hurt That eats a pit in my chest I am a child again And mother tells me “I could die today and the last thing you said to me was angry.” And I look at the keys in her hand And fear consumes me And…

[gay-joan-of-arc]

My Crochet Soul

The wind outside is relentless. It’s scary. I am sitting alone, in the dark. My body is churning with anxiety, and shame, and yet I know I need not be afraid. I don’t need to feel this way. My hands take up thread and hook, and as I hold a scrap of a scarf my fingers fall back into a familiar dance. It is the pattern and pull of my crochet. I look outside, and I live in two places – my mind with…

[gay-joan-of-arc]

Boundaries?

I feel angry and tired. I don’t want to remember, to retell my trauma again and again. I feel like a broken record stuck on the same tracks. Homelessness. No plumbing. Sleeping in a car. An unrepentant mother who takes credit for my every success while constantly placing obstacles in my way.  How do you hold boundaries with a pathological narcissist as she holds you trapped an inch to the left…

[gay-joan-of-arc]

How do you define a life well lived? (CMHA What's Your Story Prompt)

How do you define a life well lived? (CMHA What’s Your Story Prompt)

I lay down at the end of the day, and wonder when this gnawing pit inside of me will be satisfied. “You aren’t enough.” It says, “You haven’t done enough. You need to do more.” I only have a little time as a living person. Just a little time to make sense of things as best I can and try to do some good in the time I have left. I am made of borrowed matter, atoms, and molecules that existed…

[gay-joan-of-arc]

#futureread

Hi guys!!!! I'm feeling proud to finally have my first published book available on Amazon. Hoping for some people to write a review about it because that is a big help for me to keep going and do better. That is my first book and I want to know if I did better in my first one to motivate myself to create more. Thank you so much in advance 💞

https://shorturl.at/chsz3

[gay-joan-of-arc]

PFR

Book Review: The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Instructive, fascinating, and scrupulous without being overly pedantic, The Song of the Cell is Mukherjee at his best. In fact, it may be my new favorite work of his. I say that because of the way he manages to provide an intimate and detailed account of the cell as well as a wide-ranging emphasis on its evolving role in science and medicine. It truly is a remarkable lens of exploration and insight into what makes us human, into the emergent properties that are required to constitute life.

As the author himself relates, this book is a "sum of parts." Six in total. Beginning with single units and ending with the body's complex and interactive cellular ecosystem, Mukjherjee takes readers on a progressive journey. He tells the story of the cell, highlighting its complex music, if you will. He not only touches upon the physiology and pathology of the cell, but upon his general and personal history with it where he relates stories of patients whose lives have been touched by it in sickness - some of whom have been cured, others whom cannot be - as well as the medical quest that has been underway for the last century to use cells to help rebuild and repair humans.

I admit, I was worried about the lack of chronological structure early on. I feared I wouldn't be able to follow or that I'd get lost in the medical density of it all. That said, I'm pleased to say it worked better without it. Ended up being a stronger read because of it. I actually preferred the structure that was chosen because it allowed me to focus on the cell as a unit as well as extrapolate on it as a system of parts that work in tandem.

In this text, the author arranged things so as to help readers hear and understand how separate cellular components function while also showing how they build off each other to interact in comprehensive ways or systems (in our blood, in our organs, in our medical treatments, in our environment) to play one fluid song: initiating, cooperating, or malfunctioning in its bodily response. For the first time, I was able to see cells not only as the unit of life and physiology but also as the locus of disease.

There's so much to learn in these pages, so much still left for science to discover. A remarkable and illuminating read! Just brilliant.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC in exchange for my review.

5/5 stars

**Follow me on Goodreads

[gay-joan-of-arc]

Possible future reading (PFR)

Book Review: Sex Cult Nun

(Image Description: Book cover for Sex Cult Nun. Sky blue background with the title in large white print and the description in smaller black print “breaking away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical, Religious Cult”. In the middle is a fishing line and hook, with a cross attached to a ring hanging from it. I believe this is a visualization of the term “Flirty Fishing” which is explained and used frequently in the book.)

Author: Faith Jones

Rating: 5/5

Honestly, I rate memoirs very loosely. I don’t want to say anyones story is good or bad, it’s their personal story. I’m looking more for readability. This book is very approachable for people who are not familiar with the history of the Children of God. It has a very brief history of the cult origins before the author tells her own story, as the Granddaughter of the cult leader. This book was very triggering for me, so it took me a little over a month to read. Trigger warnings will be below the cut, and will include spoilers. Jones seems very intelligent and relatable. I think her story, even to people who have never been in a cult, is very important to hear. It’s good to hear about people who have been through the abuse she has been and not only succeed in life functionally but find happiness and healthy levels of forgiveness for herself and others. She also seems very down to Earth for her incredible levels of success, and very kind. I am going to be looking for her Ted Talk and to find out if she’s done any more public speaking. 

Trigger Warnings: 

Keep reading

[gay-joan-of-arc]

Hello Red Planet

I’ll never forget when I had to leave my green earth behind. The forests and hills of the Carolinas had been my natural habitat. My feet were bare and tough, my nails dirty, and my hair was a wild blond nest. I would climb trees with no branches, by wrapping my hands around the narrow trunk and bracing my feet on either side. My home was beautiful, misty moss and tightly curled fiddleheads you…

[gay-joan-of-arc]

Chapter 1: I am Not Going to Die on this Boat

Chapter 1: I am Not Going to Die on this Boat

The ship shuddered with the impact. It had been a windy morning and turned into a windy day. The wind whipped the chop into swelling waves which lifted our craft high, and as we slid down the other side we picked up speed only to be arrested violently by our collision with the next swell. I hated being on the water. I was a weak swimmer and now we were farther from land than I’d ever been, with…

[gay-joan-of-arc]

Right to Repair and The Tall Tale of WashingTin Foil

Right to Repair and The Tall Tale of WashingTin Foil

In the early months of the pandemic, when city streets stood ghostly empty, and a surge of Americans filed for unemployment – I thought of my late grandmother Josie. Grandma Josie and I had never known each other well. There had been some great familial rift that separated her from my parents that I had never fully understood – and then, before the end of my first semester in community college,…

[gay-joan-of-arc]

Values

Trying something new - doesn't matter if these are read but you are welcome if interested.

Sometimes I don’t know what to say when people ask me to name my values. We tend to represent values as lists of abstract concepts like respect, consistency, integrity, or some such garbage – but I don’t think of it that way. As living people, we are all just trying to survive – to get from A to B so we can do it all again tomorrow. Maybe you are given ten different ways to do this – ten…