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“And while it’s sometimes comforting to have a name for something I’m going through, Giovanna does not need to be pathologized. I just like how it feels pretending to be somebody calm, unwaveringly loving, and completely unafraid.”

FUCK YES!! Thank you for wrangling this human experience into language. I have felt a similar opening, like rage and grief ripping through all that is performative and saying to the world “I cannot and will no longer waste energy on being ‘appropriate’ for you.”

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I was taking a break from Instagram for a few weeks and the first thing I saw when I came back was Giovanna and I loooooved it. I also speak Italian and talk to myself in various accents and I found these videos funny, endearing, and comforting 💕

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i have started to write about a little more than a year ago, in English. i am German from the East, grew up in GDR, a country that no longer exists. I didn’t learn English until in University i took on a topic for a paper, David Hockney‘s photoworks. That was in 1998. Of course there were only English books and material. i had to read it somehow and that’s how i learned. then i met my partner, who is from California. My emotional language became English. But when i started writing, there was one subject that pushed itself forward all the time, the story of my severe sexual abuse as a child. the only way i can speak about it and all that has to do with it and my becoming the woman i am now, i can only say because i use a language that is not my mother‘s.

i admire your courage for facing your truths and the ridicule that would maybe arise if it wasn’t so very serious for you. i hope to be able to take the same courage and show it to other people who might not have a language or voice to speak their truth in. thank you for breaking the silence!

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Love you

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i adore her - she’s deeply reassuring to me too! thank you for bringing her into the world and sharing her with us ;)

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This resonates. I was ready to change my name a couple of days ago.

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You know I love the people of broken English. And JB: “Artists are the only people who know the truth about us”….yes

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DJ Adam Lucky Forever <3

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lol I did Devon last week. Tracks. Hey pal can I get pre-sale status or is that too high maintenance

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I have resurrected the guiding-light aphorism I discovered forty years ago. "Try to live the good life in spite of the assholes." Example...

Great party here last night... table for seven... three couples and me. My brother Ron's wife Megan made cioppino... six bottles of wine emptied... all lefties at the table... Mark (just retired from Boeing) and Kerry (who mentioned that the guy with the big dick who raped her ten years ago exposed himself to the woman running the prison meditation class)... Paul (who is a finance wizard and deep into crypto currency and still can't explain in plain English how it works) and Christine, Megan's droll, lively sidekick since high school. We did talk some politics (I asked, "Is God a redneck?"), but we didn't stay there long.

Megan told the story of Halloween night. She and Ron were all set up for trick-or-treat when her

cranky widower father Carl (93) called and said that all his power went off. Just before dusk, Megan drove out to Lake Forest Park and found that Carl's house was the only house on his street without power. She went to the breaker box with a flashlight and every switch was in the off position, even the main breaker, and the main breaker wouldn't move. It was a fiasco tale that generated a lot of laughter... Carl's house full of plugged-in extension cords snaking in all directions... the kitchen sink full of dirty dishes, Carl waiting for his wife Pat to come back from the dead and tidy up... the refrigerator full of large unopened blocks of Costco cheese... the basement freezer full of mail-order meat purchased many years ago... in the bedroom, dirty clothes strewn everywhere, except for the 70 pairs of pressed khakis hanging neatly in Carl's closet.

For three hours on Halloween night, Carl sat at the breakfast table here, acting grumpy because Ron & Megan were putting all their attention on the 200 kids who came to the door, 100 more than usual, because someone in the neighborhood had taped the word "October" to our street sign so that it read... October 31st Avenue NE, leading parents who were driving their kids elsewhere to pull over to cash in on what promised to be a candy bonanza at every house for four blocks.

Megan shifted the story to Carl's health, his increasingly curmudgeonly behavior, and the fact that soon the executor of Carl's estate, Megan herself, must deal with the directives in his will... and Christine,

doing her impression of Megan, said gravely... "... and to my beloved only son Jon, I leave my ten boxes of frozen Omaha Steaks."

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