Hailey Robbins
(she/her/hers)
Hailey is a fourth-year student double majoring in English and History. She loves reading, dancing, and anything and everything Shakespeare-related. When she’s not in a late night dance rehearsal or endlessly raving about why she wants to move to Edinburgh after graduation, she enjoys napping, burning scented candles (she coordinates her selection to each season), and thrifting.
“Don’t do this job for your whole life,” my customer, an older gentleman with a shock of white hair says, smirking at me. It’s 3 PM on a Saturday.
The Sunday night before spring break, after an Instagram direct message from my friend in Tallahassee, I decided to upend my plans to return home to wintery New Hampshire and instead travel south to sunny Florida.
In talking to my female-identifying peers, I’ve found that almost every one of them remembers a time when a man has said something so demeaning, sexist, or uncomfortable, that it has stuck with them for ages.
Let me tell you a story. A story that I wish I’d asked for earlier in life. A story I received, in the form of a letter, on my sixteenth birthday.
One bite at a time
my mother says as it sits there
in my kitchen
blowing dish-soap bubbles
through its pool-noodle nose.
It is tea time and Mary, Queen of Scots is sitting next to me on a rickety bench on a gritty sidewalk. Up the hill is a stone castle. This, I think, is what I expected adult life to be — a posh tea, flower blossoms in glass teapots.
Whether you love or hate her music (and I, for one, hope you love it), you have to acknowledge that Taylor Swift is a master of reinventing herself.
I never thought I’d be able to say that I became best friends with a Scottish drag queen after winning a dance contest that had me death-dropping onto a sticky floor in a basement bar in Edinburgh. Enter Amy L’Amour.
They’re all the same, really, Mari thinks as she straightens her stiff, white coat and brushes a stray auburn hair back into her claw clip.
Upon arriving in the humid, gray streets of Washington D.C., the first thing I noticed was the flower crowns. Then the glitter.
I have been wondering, lately, about my womanhood. It is not that I question the existence of the identity — I know I am a woman, and thank the universe every day that I was fortunate enough to be born in the right body. I embrace my “femininity” and feel the pain that comes with it. This much, I have a hold on.