I just checked the archive of my Questions to Ask posts and it looks like I missed the one-year anniversary by a handful of weeks, but I don’t think that prohibits me from doing a belated retrospective. It’s not the first time I’ve missed a birthday and I promise it won’t be the last.
(One year, I forgot my dad’s birthday and didn’t realize until 10 DAYS LATER. Then, three weeks after that, I forgot to wish him a happy Father’s Day. Luckily, my dad isn’t very fussed about these things. Maybe that’s where I get it from.)
I started writing Questions to Ask for fun last February. It remains fun —which, as an adult in this day and age, is too often in short supply — and I’m excited to keep sharing my irregular writings (ahem, “for readers who may or may not want answers”).
This is a little roundup of the QtA posts that have prompted especially meaningful responses from and personal conversations with all of you over the past 13 months. By the way, I’m so appreciative of every email reply, Instagram DM, and text I’ve received, not to mention the shares and in-person comments. The full back-catalogue of posts is online, in case you want to (re-)read.
Why do people want to become parents?
Feelings are situated knowledge: about safety, pleasure, and aliveness.
The surge of new parents in my circle of friends has slowed down since I wrote this post, but I’ve had plenty of conversations since with other people who still grapple with the question of parenthood. I’m less convinced by arguments of evolutionary biology than I was at the time of writing, but I stand by my comments on knowledge and experiences being situated within the body.
I also stand by my skeptical musings at the end about whether the topic is as morally fraught as it’s made out to be — but I will admit that Yuriko’s impassioned argument about the promises that we can’t make to the unborn did leave a lasting impression on me.
Why do women always have to come off clean?
Desire exists for desire’s sake, to strengthen the connection between body and space.
Books are one of the primary technologies I use to make sense of myself and the world. Inevitably, the topics that wind up in my writing first filter their way to me through whatever I’m reading. Actually, a lot of the topics and ideas that trigger my curiosity are overlapping, linked within my personal neural universe. Although I’m not highlighting it here, my piece about I Care a Lot was by no means the end of my interest in mimesis. Right now, I’m reading Wanting by Luke Burgis, a pop-philosophy synthesis of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. And here we are, back at desire again.
Among the books I read in 2021, Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick remains a standout. I still find myself thinking about the women in Lisa Taddeo’s reportage on desire, as well: how their desires were dismissed, penalized, or weaponized against them.
What does it mean to be well?
We are disabled by our environments, not our bodies.
Of all the posts I’ve written this past year, I was the most nervous about this one. I knew I wanted to write about my MS diagnosis. I also knew that I wanted to mark the anniversary of the diagnosis in some way (for all that I chronically forget birthdays, I seem to have a thing about notable dates). The diagnosis anniversary fell on a Friday this year, which matches my QtA publishing schedule. But I couldn’t decide if I was ready to ‘come out’ with a chronic illness. I considered delaying until 2023. Wildly spreading my personal health information across the internet seemed potentially unwise; the draft of the piece actually referred to a “chronic neurological condition” until almost the last second before I clicked “Send.” The photos from my MRI scans were on a CD, which I hurriedly took to the library before it closed so that I could use their desktop computers to extract the pictures. In the end, the piece had a momentum of its own. I’m glad and proud that I allowed myself to publish it.
Questions to Ask backwards.