KFA’s Writing, Work, & Wild Tales

Stories about highly ambitious kids are told in fairytale terms, but in reality, being a young prodigy can be a nightmare. We desperately want our kids to be top achievers, but we don’t have the infrastructure to support them as they reach for increasingly unattainable ideals. Plenty of officials have started to sound the alarm on this. The U.S. Surgeon General called free-falling adolescent mental health “the crisis of our time.” The CDC recently found that teen girls, in particular, are “engulfed in trauma,” even at a time when young women are being pushed to achieve more, more, more and go higher, higher, higher in academia. But the trophies aren’t worth the price we’re paying for them.

I agonized over the red flags in the days before the procedure. Despite my concerns, I chose to go through with it for uniquely American reasons. It was the end of the year, I’d have the chance to recover over the holidays without missing work, and my deductible was about to reset, meaning the surgery would be much more expensive if I waited. I rationalized my uneasiness because it wasn’t just some random clinic or some random surgeon...

Last week, the Huffington Post ran an expose about the prevalence of sexual misconduct in competitive debate, with a specific emphasis on high school students who are fighting for protections and reforms. The world of high school debate is rife with abuse, some of it committed by high school competitors but a disturbing amount of it inflicted on minors by the adults who are supposedly in charge of them...

When I think about the times I’ve reported, I not only don’t think of justice: I think of active harm done to me for my trouble. I think of the time that a police officer threatened to have me arrested and sent to juvenile hall for the night when I was sitting in a hospital bed with bloody underwear. These are not unique anecdotes. Survivors are harassed by police, investigators, and lawyers. Many of these interactions happen in back-room settings, a tactic that certainly seems to enable people to get away with doing bad shit to survivors and not having to publicly account for it. Survivors are tasked with making an impossible choice. We have to choose something so consequential in a system of bad options. It is an imminent and pressing question for us to develop alternative ways of seeking “justice” and fundamentally reshaping our cultural discussions about it.

While the incoming Biden administration has committed to reimagining the controversial Title IX rules that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos finalized earlier this year, the new administration’s actions will be crucial to reaffirming the faith of sexual violence survivors after the damage of the Trump presidency.

A discussion, brainstorm, and Q&A about corruption, trauma, and the patriarchy in politics - with John Vigna and Kate Alexandria, respectively the former Communications Director & Digital Director of the California Democratic Party.

Their Only Power Is Pretending You Don’t Have Any: How Speaking About My Secrets As a Survivor Set Me Free In early October, the Huffington Post published an exposé about pervasive sexual violence in the elite high school debate community. After reading it and watching it make the rounds on social media, I decided it was time to tell my complete story so that other survivors wouldn’t be trapped with their abusers for no other reason than that they feel alone and fear they won’t be believed. So

I currently serve as Digital Director at the California Democratic Party. Up until last Friday, I was also one of three plaintiffs participating in a sexual harassment & retaliation lawsuit against the Party. But last Friday, I dropped out of the lawsuit (which, if you haven’t already, you should look up and read in its entirety, or the excerpts published on Twitter.) I didn’t drop out because any of the allegations I made (or the allegations that my co-plaintiffs made) are untrue. In fact, I vigorously defend every allegation that has been made in that case against the Party.

Chronically ill or medically complex patients face all kinds of discrimination and uncooperative attitudes from our medical system. This especially goes for women, queer individuals, and BIPOC, who deal with institutional oppression, gaslighting, and medical bias that ranges from infuriating to deadly. If you’re just starting out on the journey of being chronically ill or managing a disability, it can be incredibly daunting and demoralizing to see how uncooperative medical systems are.

Work-from-home policies are not a blanket solution for the financial and institutional pressures that disabled people face. Working from home is still working and comes with its own unique stressors. It is not a solution that will work for everybody in our community, and we shouldn’t stop striving for an equitable safety net, including modernized SSDI guidelines to protect disabled people when they can’t work. But if you’re considering working from home as a disabled person, you might be curious about how you can set yourself up for success, reduce stress and burnout, and find balance and stability.

The medical sexism dysautonomia patients face is a well-documented source of frustration and harm in the community. Many of us have spent years being dismissed at every turn while our symptoms worsened. I’m not mad about the new attention and funding directed at dysautonomia; we need it desperately. But we’ve needed it for decades. When the problem was pervasive but mostly impacting young women, it was apparently not worth attention, funding, or validation. Now that it is a literally contagious issue — now that our suffering can be caught by men — it is a revolutionary priority in the medical and public health fields.

One in 13 people in the United States are developing long COVID-19 that ranges in severity from inconvenient to outright debilitating. What’s more, women are 22% more likely to wind up with long COVID than men are. The community of young women who speak out about life with a disability — increasingly on TikTok, but also through Facebook, Instagram, and the hashtag #NEISVoid on Twitter — has provided a sense of support and strength to people on many different disability journeys, including long COVID patients. It can be transformative and empowering to pass on wisdom and hear collective experiences. But for young women and femmes of all identities, visibility of any kind frequently comes with a unique type of sexual harassment, and that has been true in this community as well.

In late May 2018, about two weeks after my 21st birthday, I got news that changed my life: I urgently needed open heart surgery. On July 2nd, I woke up in the ICU on a ventilator with a broken sternum, my aortic aneurysm grafted in plastic, a titanium valve clicking away in place of my bicuspid aortic valve. Now, nearly three years later, I’m just beginning to accept the impact that July 2nd, 2018 had on me — the gifts, the curses, the blessings, the frustrations, and the ever-present sound of my mechanical heartbeat.

Earlier this summer, the buzz for the upcoming show Ahsoka was palpable at the Star Wars Convention in Anaheim. Due to be released in 2023, the show has been teased as a critical piece that will lay the groundwork for a major crossover event among the Star Wars shows that Disney+ currently streams. The excitement for the show marks a radical new chapter for the titular character, Ahsoka Tano. Now more than ever, Ahsoka’s journey — and the evolution of the public’s perception of her — offers a blueprint for young women who seek to do good and be honest in their resistance and activism amid increasingly chaotic, violent, and corrupt times.

“There is a big difference between things being fair and things being set right.” So says Galaxy “Alex” Stern, the protagonist in beloved fantasy author Leigh Bardugo’s novel Ninth House. Bardugo, a well-known writer whose Shadow and Bone trilogy was adapted into a hit Netflix show, presents a supposedly formulaic ghost story that ends up revealing a cutting commentary about rape culture and a metacriticism of the male-dominated fantasy genre.