Mahalo for visiting! If you’ve come from the old site or we’re already friends, I’m so glad you came to check out the new digs. The old site will stay up and I’ll be republishing my favorite pieces here.
If this is our first time meeting, I hope you stay awhile. My name is Celeste Noelani McLean and for the past few years I have been blogging at RunningNekkid.com.
My work mostly explores the feminist intersection of grief, mental illness, and my mixed-race Pacific Islander ancestry. Raised in Kahaluʻu on the island of Oʻahu and currently living in Seattle, I have been trying to come to terms with living so far away from the place I call homeland. Sometimes I’m even okay with it, though mostly I totally am not. Welcome to a blog filled with homesick hand wringing.
The blog is also filled with death, and the enormous trauma of being left behind. I have lost so many people close to me, the bulk of these losses occurring before I was nineteen years old. I spent most of my life numb and running from my grief, only to have it come calling in September 2009. That year, my middle son was stillborn at 22 weeks gestation, causing the breakdown that would become the beginning of my precarious recovery process. It was through piecing the ashes of my life back together in the face of stillbirth that I began coming to terms with my decades-old losses and deep-seated cultural grief. I am not healed, but I am healing. And that is such a bittersweet gift.
Contact
Heck yes, you should totally get in touch. You can use the contact form, send me an email, ping me on twitter or on my FB page. Let’s hang out! Only, I mean hang out online because I don’t actually talk to people in person if I can avoid it. Let’s just be real for a moment. Social Anxiety sufferers, represent!
Credits
Life With No Room – Winner of second prize in the Mothering Through the Darkness competition. Anthology published by HerStories, available now.
On Choosing Life – Published on Stigma Fighters December 16, 2014. Included in the Stigma Fighters anthology vol I, available now.
Sometimes Babies Don’t Come Home – Published on SisterWives Speak October 9, 2014
He Loves Me Despite Myself – Featured on BlogHer September 12, 2014 and earned me a spot a as a BlogHer VOTY 2015 honoree.
It’s Such A Bummer About Body Hair Featured on BlogHer August 8, 2014
Spotlight On Baby Loss: The Isolation of Grieving My Dead Son -Published at Band Back Together October 26, 2012
Nice Things Even Nicer People Have Said About Me
“…Poignant, poetic, earnest, soft. She does an exemplary job of taking us through her journey wrapping around and all the while gleaning cogent and complicated insights. Truly remarkable.”
Dr. Jessica Zucker Mothering Through the Darkness contest judge
“I don’t know if you ever have those days where you wake up convinced you are the worst writer in the world. I have those.
Just in case you do, I wanted to tell you the truth: You are EXCEPTIONAL.”
Chris Hendrickson
“I love barf!!!!! And I love you even more!!!!”
– my friend Karen