42 Things You Might Do at Wellesley
By Olivia Funderburg '18
Smuggle Domino’s into Clapp
See all the lamps across campus turn on
Go a whole semester without eating in Tower
Take a night ride on the Peter
Play hide-and-seek in the Science Center
On Amma, Queerness, & Being Out of Her Reach
By Suma Cheru '18
Content warning: Parent death
I often wonder whether my deceased mother would support or reject my queerness.
Read MoreSo I Head You Were Palestinian
By Lanie Najjab '18
Content warning: anti-Palestinian sentiments
One day after school, a boy I’d spoken perhaps three words to cornered me by my band locker. “So I heard you were Palestinian,” he said.
He then proceeded to tell me that I was a liar. “No one is from Palestine,” he said. “It doesn’t exist, and it never existed. No one lived there before the creation of Israel.”
Read MoreComma
By Jane Vaughan '18
Content warning: description of judgmental attitudes about chronic illness
First, it came for my lungs, delicate balloons swelling and emptying purposefully, a whoosh of air spreading throughout my body. It attacked the fine threads of my airways. Lungs rattling, raspy air forcing its way through, trying to extract a full, clean breath. My chest constricts tightly.
Read MoreA Sim(ulated) Escape
By Emy Urban '18
Content warning: suicide
It was exhilarating to have complete control over Sebastian, whose life was always perfectly in order, his “mood meter” always full. At the times when I was most stressed, I would return to my little world of The Sims, half-jokingly telling my friends, “If I can’t have my life together, at least Sebastian can."
Read MoreKeeping the Faith
By Anonymous
Content warning: mention of rape and genocide
When people ask me about my faith, they often expect a word. I have a lot of words.
Read More"Privilege" List
by Anonymous
Content warning: Islamophobia, racism
This semester, my WGST professor asked us to create a list of our privileges. Instead, I decided to make a list of the privileges I was never afforded as a Muslim-American. The following is my “privilege” list.
Read MoreLa Vie en Rose: My Year With a Conservative Catholic Family in France
By Anonymous
Content warnings: homophobia, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny
When I decided in my first year at Wellesley that I wanted to spend my junior year in France, I hadn’t realized how being a lesbian might affect that experience. As I prepared to leave during sophomore spring, I decided I would not come out to my host family, but remain quietly closeted. In any case, I assumed LGBTQ+ issues would rarely come up and, if they did, that my imagined host family would be tolerant at best or indifferent at worst.
Read MoreI'm Sorry I'm Not Perfect
By Olivia Funderburg '18
Overall, I was left with a burning question: what if Lady Bird had really pushed boundaries? What if the film took its mother-daughter story and complicated it?
Read MoreShipwrecked
By Samantha English
Content warning: mention of anxiety, depression, and emotional abuse
I fell in love with the Brontë sisters when I was sixteen. I read Wuthering Heights in a slow-churning tempest of terror and intrigue, Cathy’s ghost lingering over my shoulder as I drew complex family trees of the Earnshaw and Linton families at my kitchen table. I carried my black-penned copy of Emily’s singular work to you, Wellesley, where it sat watching me, witchlike, waiting to be joined by its sister novels. It didn’t take long. By my second semester, I was in the Nineteenth Century Novel class, combing obsessively through Jane Eyre. I wasn’t just hooked. I was haunted.
Read MoreHebron: A Day in the Life
By Charlotte Kaufman
Content warning: description of anti-Palestinian violence
Our bus pulled in from Ramallah to the place that people told me I should not go: Hebron, the formerly thriving capital and largest city in the West Bank of Palestine. Even members of my immediate family warned me it could be dangerous for an American Jew.
Read MoreAguas Negras
By Alicia Margarita Olivo
Content warning: description of violence, implication of depression, mention of hurricane, flood
Being at Wellesley makes me feel like I’m wading through flood waters (I remember when Tropical Storm Allison hit home and my dad took my hand and helped me walk through the water to see the cars stuck on the street; I thought they were sharks in the deep), or that I’m carrying a weight on my chest. Now that I’m 1,806 miles away from home (if I were to walk home—sometimes I imagine society collapsing and everything going to complete shit [more than it already has] and, stuck without the availability to drive, I would walk those 1,806 miles back home) and family, bringing up any topic that might be considered Heavy seems rude.
Read MoreLuisa and Luis Meet and Ariana Happens: A Wellesley Story
By Ariana Gonzalez-Bonillas
Content warning: binary language to honor how Luisa and Azucena experienced Wellesley
August 1990.
Luisa arrives at Wellesley, Purple Class of 1994. The Latinas that Azucena had adopted and helped to grow in turn adopt and care for Luisa. Luisa majors in Latin American Studies, becomes a Mellon Mays Scholar, and struggles to learn how to be at a predominantly white institution. Soon, she will find a companion in her struggle who knows what she is going through, too.
Read MoreKamala Khan: The Ms.-Ing Piece of the Marvel Universe
By Padya Paramita
Content warning: mention of Nazis
On the day after the 2016 US presidential elections, a queer international student of color found herself at a comic book store face-to-face with a superhero she had never seen before. In encountering Kamala Khan—known by her superhero alias, Ms. Marvel—I discovered a girl much like myself: brown, Muslim, fighting demons, trying to find a balance between Americanization and her South Asian roots.
Read More