"For the first time since my adolescence, I am recognizing that I don’t have to believe what everyone believes, nor do I have to base my morals on faceless strangers who don’t know who I am, or what my experiences are."
"For me, being a feminist simply means I am a strong, independent woman who has ideas and thoughts of her own; but it also means something else, which is an idea that confuses even me. I mean, how could I be a feminist when I am also a conservative woman?"
"When I was first accepted into the PhD by research program in the UK, I had mixed feelings, mainly because I was about to pursue a career that I didn’t have the heart for, and partially because I would need to explore yet another new culture, country, and environment."
"When I return to Sam’s place with the cheesecloth, I smell our “soup” pot. Shit. I envision the blotter headline: ECU Professor busted for marijuana. What a way to make my graduate mentors proud and to show success at this professor business."
I couldn't go to India for the past two years due to COVID-19 uncertainties and be with the rest of my family to help them navigate through this earth-shattering loss when they needed me the most, a sad reality of many international students.”
"A tree once taught me that those moments of ruin are only a pause, a passage really, on the way to something else."
"The words we use and how we say them are much more than sounds, they tell a story that gives us away, revealing a history about and behind us, a place and a people that we have come from."
Autoethnographic Literary Nonfiction: I Just Want to Go Home – Moving, Loss and Unacknowledged Grief
"Moving away from a beloved home at a tender age was traumatizing, in part, because that home was the only place in which I felt safe."
"Have you ever crossed the desert in a circus train? I took such a detour—by choice— in 1978 when I hung up my pointe shoes to ride an elephant named Peggy."
"I had no idea what the repercussions would be should I disclose my identity to my students. Would I be fired? Would I be questioned? Would I be told not to talk of such things? This reticence is a sad reflection on my internalized homophobia, my being still uncomfortable enough with my identity such that I had to worry about keeping it secret."
"When a favorite perfume ceases to exist, it is another kind of death. Having been created, it leaves a special sort of emptiness," from Eulogy for a Perfume.
"Unspeakable is a consideration of the silencing effects of stuttering, political censorship, unspeakable wartime atrocities, and the silent communication within virtual relationships."
