The Social-Political Turmoil That Led to My Secret Marriage

What can a queer and trans couple do when met with tyranny and oppression in 2025? Get secretly married, naturally.

Happy Monday, Throughlines subscribers. There are 106 of you now! For just three weeks of newsletters, that is absolutely insane to me. I cannot thank you enough for being here. Freelance writing can be a lonely place sometimes, so thank you for helping me feel like I’m not constantly screaming into the void. Your responses and reactions to these posts are literally everything to me. muah <3

Throughlines is still in its early days—26 days to be exact—but I have some big plans for the future. For example, paying subscribers will start getting access to some sneak-peeks of my debut novel and explainers on how I edited each section 🫨

Additionally, before we get down to it this week, I want to share a thought or two about paywalls. Point blank, as a former journalist I hate them and find them unethical: Why is it that the most important news and information are often paywalled and inaccessible to the general public while “fluff” pieces and clickbait are free for all? This informative, useful, and often essential information should be free. It’s giving dystopia, babes. Hard news should never be paywalled, and you’ll never change my mind on that.

Now though, as a creator and fiction writer—and an apparent hypocrite—I find myself wondering why more people in this space don’t use paywalls. I often think of this tweet below from 2023 that pretty much sums up my feelings.

Y’all really don’t want to know how many [true!] sob stories I drafted in the hopes of gaining people’s (especially other journalists’) sympathy or clout or a job offer or whatever it was at the time.

I’m so glad I didn’t give away some of my most sensitive life stories for free for the Internet to pick apart forever. And I have to wonder at the thousands of creators on sites like TikTok who are mining their deepest darkest moments for engagement. I have to constantly remind myself that the Internet lasts forever, and that my unpublished SA mini-memoir I wrote when I was 22 and still living in my trauma is not something I’d want future employers looking at when I’m 36. My motto for the last few years has been to only write publicly about my traumas once they have faded into scars. I’ve learned I lack perspective when I try to write about still-open wounds.

Anyway, I’m getting way too long-winded. You came here (I hope) to read my weekly musings on the throughlines of life and (I think) to learn about the crazy winding road that led me and my love towards a secret early marriage. After writing the story out, I realized that this happy and blissful moment in me and my husband’s life is, like it or not, politically and socially fraught—being a queer and trans couple in 2025 is certainly not the safest thing. It’s something that I want to share in writing only with a select few readers who I know will respect me—as a writer and a person—and respect that some stories are just a little more private than others.

In an effort to do that, I’m turning on paid subscriptions so I can share a little more freely with you. I’ve lowered my paid subscription rate to 30% off or ~$5 per month (as low as Substack will allow) in hopes of making this space a little more accessible to all of my early subscribers. This offer will be good for the next week. (Conversely if you’re one of my exes I’ve seen lurking around here without subscribing, it’s double or nothing for this one, babes. I’m sure you still have my venmo😉)

Please know, though, that having you here and being able to be in conversation with you is the most important thing to me. I have exciting plans for Throughlines, and I want you to be a part of it. If you are a student without disposable income, un- or under-employed, or a minimum-wage worker, just email me or fill out this form and I’ll comp you a free subscription with all the paid perks, no questions asked. If you’d like to donate one of these subscriptions, you can do so here.

Whew! Glad that’s over. Talking about money makes me sweat. Let’s get into the fun stuff now, aka exploring this week’s Throughline: Rolling with the punches and finding joy amidst heartbreak.

The moment! Photo by Katherine Bowes.

The wedding that wasn’t supposed to happen vs. the girl who never felt like getting married in the first place

March 15, 2025. My wedding date. It wasn’t supposed to happen this early. It wasn’t supposed to be this political. If you’d ask any younger version of me about marriage, she’d tell you it wasn’t supposed to happen at all.

And yet there we stood, tears of joy in our eyes as we recited our vows to each other, holding a big metaphorical middle finger up to D*nald Tr*mp and all he had put us through as a couple in the span of just three short months.