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I had a conversation several months ago with my boyfriend about mental illness after a mutual friend of ours wrote a Facebook post about her struggles with depression. Neither of us had really known she struggled to the extent that she divulged there and then, though I knew from my years of friendship with her that it was certainly something she was familiar with. The conversation was mostly stopped at every turn because both of us realized we didn't know what we were talking about. We had not battled mental illness, and so had no real roads out of the conversation aside from what we'd watched our friends go through. We've both been depressed, sure. We're creatives, writers, deep thinkers, empaths. It's more rare for someone of our dispositions not to have these kinds of issues. But I've never felt hopeless, and my boyfriend concurs that neither has he. I've never been at the end of any rope for too long. Like most people, whether they'd like to admit

I finished listening to S-Town today, the new podcast spearheaded by This American Life producer Brian Reed. As anyone reading this knows by now, it's set in a tiny, rural town called Woodstock, in Alabama. I know this place, although not well. My appearance in Woodstock, or anywhere in Bibb County for that matter, would certainly seem out of place. I was raised in Hoover, a suburb of suburbs, just outside Birmingham. Now I live downtown in Birmingham. Woodstock is about a 40-minute drive from here, but it still seems pretty close. When I was little, my dad would take me for rides on his motorcycle. We'd always drive through the country, where there was fresh air and open, twisty roads and distance. No mall traffic, no stop-and-go, just riding. Even though Hoover, like I said, is a textbook suburb town, full of strip malls and chain stores and subdivisions and one large indoor shopping mall, it really doesn't take you long at all to find the country. Woodstock was one o

I am glad that dictionaries still exist, and that people at my library still ask for them. They're not exactly practical, so I can't quite say why it is I'm glad about this, but I am. For the past few weeks we've kept one on the desk next to the hole punch and staplers because people were asking for it so often. It occasionally gets reshelved, and even though just now I had to get up and pull it from the shelf, the big heavy heft of the thing, I was glad to have to do it. I, myself, haven't used a real dictionary in so long I can't remember. Likely it was back in high school. I look up words often, though, on my computer, on my phone. Any time I'm reading and come across one I don't know I pull out my phone and search it. When I was younger, I'd make lists to take to the dictionary later. I get words sent to me by email every day and I know a lot of the words-of-the-day I receive already, but I honestly have trouble making use of all the great word

My name is Cheyenne. Like the Native Americans, or like the capital of Wyoming, or like the river, or like Marlon Brando's deceased daughter [none of which I happen to have any affiliation with]. I am from Birmingham, Alabama, as strange as it seems to say that. My family moved here [for good] when I was not quite even 3, so saying I am from anywhere else doesn't really make much sense. I'm certainly not from Newcastle, England, where my dad was born and raised, and where his family lives, and where we went to visit every year, consistently, until I was about 17. And I'm certainly not from the Appalachian Mountains, the border between Virginia and Tennessee, where my mom grew up, and where her family still mostly lives [though leaves of us have scattered as far as New York, Istanbul]. My parents both left long-rooted, deep-seeded homes to end up here, in the Steel City, with no family and no friends, and planted me here in a valley, surrounded by city, by coal, by