TAYLOR ENGLE ANDERSON BRAIN

There is a tree near my house that I talk to. I call her Tree. One day a few years ago, I got the pull to walk over to her and put my hands on her trunk. Peace came over me, and I was reminded that I used to talk to nature all of the time as a child—until someone overheard me one day and made me feel like a fuh-reak. I stopped, intuiting that if I didn’t, I might be either ostracized or hospitalized (or both). I had no idea I’d be back on my bullshit twenty-five years later.

My anorexia was molded by fashion magazine subscriptions, early 2000s SoCal dance studios, WeightWatchers, Lean Cuisine, the runways I desperately wanted to walk. The ludicrously normalized idea of chewing food and spitting it out just to “get a taste.” By the time my age was in the double digits, I’d been energetically flattened by this cultural and common rhetoric. I let society convince me that my ultimate goal was to be thin. I fell for it for years. insert clown emoji.

The world feels loud, fast, fractured, irreparable. Still, kindness always finds a way to stubbornly break through. This is where I try to keep my focus. The other day at my favorite coffee shop, a woman in a wheelchair fell forward onto the floor. Before the shock even had time to settle, three or four people were rushing to her from different corners of the room. No hesitation: just movement. I think about that moment a lot. It’s what gives me faith when the light feels d

Writing is isolating work. It is solitary by nature. It requires you to sit still and live inside your own head for long stretches of time. It’s a beautiful thing, but it can also be intense and overwhelming. When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a writer, full stop. I imagined a life of books, quiet rooms and endless drafts. But over time (and into a 10-year professional writing career), I have realized that full-time writing demands a deep interior life. You have to

“What does a soulmate feel like?” asked The Skeptic Who Wanted to Believe. She answered with a bright smile she couldn’t contain: “It’s the eternal bottom of an exhale.” She means ultimate release: Giving everything away, everything you have, with the trust, with faith, with belief that it will return to you— And then doing it again the very next day.

In the long gallery of medieval Europe, few went as hard in the paint as Hildegard von Bingen. Born in 1098 in the Rhineland, she was a Benedictine abbess (can any of us say the same?), visionary mystic, composer, natural philosopher, medical writer, and political correspondent at a time when women were rarely encouraged to be anything at all. Hildegard did not so much transcend her era as bend it, using its language of faith to articulate a defiantly original intellect. She

This is a fiction piece, inspired by losing my father in 2021. As he was leaving his body, he ludicrously, deliriously asked us to help him escape the hospital so he could go on his own terms. That didn't happen—but in this story, it does. I submitted this piece to a writing contest. It was not accepted, so I’m taking control of my voice and publishing it here. I’ve stopped treating rejection as a verdict. I’m less interested now in knocking on doors and more interested in le