Here are some of my favorite pieces from the year!

Another year is in the books, and to close the year with the final Thursday newsletter, I wanted to put together picks of some of my favorite pieces we’ve published this year. This collection of essays, editorials, features, and more have plenty in common with each other: adapting to a world that still has devastating disregard for disabilities and mental health issues, being vulnerable through honesty, and perspectives we may not have ever had if it weren’t for the pandemic. You’ll find lessons around hope, resiliency, healing, and change in these. I hope something in these resonates with you as much as it has with me.

If you find it in your heart to give, consider donating to BSR. Your contributions help us to publish stories like these—stories that may have a significantly positive impact on you or someone you love. And regardless if you give or not, thank you for giving us your time and for reading our contributors' pieces, for supporting the arts in Philadelphia and beyond, and for making 2022 a year to remember.

See you next year! Peace and love to you and yours,

Kyle V. Hiller
BSR associate editor

Michelle Chikaonda experienced her 15-year college reunion just a few weeks before her 20-year high school reunion and they both hit hard. “Every encounter, smile, or hug with my former classmates was its own throwback moment,” she wrote, and as we contemplate how this pandemic has altered our paths and journeys, Chikaonda asks tough questions: “How did we do this,” “why did we do this,” and “who was I before now?”

It’s easy to get caught up in your own bubble, especially when you live in a country as individualistic and divided as the US. Anndee Hochman got the chance to experience a totally different perspective about masking in the pandemic during a trip to Chile this summer, where “It never became political.”

Danie “Ocean” Jackson invites us to a vulnerable story about losing their vision due to a degenerative eye disease, adapting to everyday life, and treating herself to an electronic drum kit as a birthday present. “This Black, queer, blind, nonbinary person still has something more than suffering to experience in this life. It’s gratitude.”

The summer reads were on fire at BSR this year, huh? Daralyse Lyons’ midsummer essay opens up about her struggles with the incredibly rare and definitely invisible Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and how it impacted her identity.

Friendship breakups and falling-outs can be vastly challenging—a different kind of challenge than a breakup with, say, a romantic partner. In another Chikaonda piece, we see that the truths of the stories behind these situations reveal more than just “a fight,” but that maybe we haven’t been “writing my story with the agency I believed; I had been handing others the power to drive our collective narrative, and then figuring out the places in which I could support that narrative. I as a person never fully showed up: the performative function of me did.”

Anne Ishii is a rockstar here in Philly. She’s “the host of WHYY’s Movers & Makers, executive director of the Asian Arts Initiative, co-chair of the Asian American Writers Workshop, and is a writer, entrepreneur, and translator,” and Crystal Sparrow got to chat with her back in late winter.

What happens when you fuse “the interactions of African American and Jewish American diasporic identities” into a hearty cookbook? You get Koshersoul by Michael Twitty, and Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer previewed his book this past fall.

Our brave, dedicated, hard-working (I can go on with the adjectives all day, no shame at all here) editor-in-chief Alaina Johns bracketed the year with two very powerful essays. First, she talked to us about her (and many others’) struggles with bipolar disorder, its misrepresentation in media, and how “Being honest about this is a good way to start the new year. Not because I owe anyone my medical history or even my reasons for resting, but because I see honesty as an investment in my recovery, and despite a sea of psychotherapy memes on Twitter, it’s still hard to talk about this.” She closes the year with the final piece from BSR with revealing her bout with a cancer diagnosis. In it, she quotes Alice Wong, saying that “Being vulnerable, as well as honest, is the key to collective liberation… It requires daily intentions, self-reflections, and support from the people who care about you.”