HeyJaredMessy Reinvention
Reinvention is not self-improvement. It is disobedience. Essays on queerness, deafness, and refusing to make yourself smaller so a room stays comfortable.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 15
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- Sep 30, 2026
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- Aug 8, 2026
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I Would Have Said Yes Too (opens the original)
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I wrote a sentence last month that I had to stop working for a moment after.It’s five words long. It comes about a third of the way into a Silent Horrors story called A Gracious Woman, which is narrated by a woman named Elena who has been fully conscious inside her own body for seventy years while something else drives it.She’s at a luncheon. She’s ninety-six and looks sixty, because the thing wearing her maintains her the way you would maintain a car. She’s describing her own table with the pre
Things My Grandmother Actually Said (opens the original)
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I’ve written about my grandmother as the one who stayed. The one who kept the records hidden, who gave me a name in secret, who built me into someone who could survive being exactly who I was.All of that is true.Here’s the part I haven’t told you yet: she was also unhinged. In the best possible way. A genuinely filthy, fearless, bulldozer of a woman who got the two of us in trouble constantly, and who saved a version of herself that nobody else in the family ever got to meet.The number
Neither Room Clears Me (opens the original)
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I was at a Deaf community center a while back, still learning ASL, and someone told a joke.I caught the shape of it before I caught the words. A hand moved, a face shifted, and the room broke into laughter a half-beat before I’d actually finished parsing what had been said. So I did the thing I do. I laughed too, right on time, timed to the room instead of the language, smiling because the moment called for a smile, not because I’d caught the joke.Everyone there was lovely. Genuinely, completely
The Shirtless Photo (opens the original)
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A while back I wrote an essay called This Body Is Evidence. The argument was simple: this body survived things, and every time someone calls a photo of it a thirst trap, or a distraction, or a liability to my credibility, they’re asking me to treat the evidence like an embarrassment.I meant every word of it.I did not expect to need it quite this literally, quite this fast.There's a photo of me from awhile back. Not a shoot, not a statement, just a
Who Was Still There (opens the original)
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Earlier this year I wrote an essay called The Balcony, about a period after I went deaf when I stood outside one night in total silence and genuinely wondered whether the world still had a place in it for a version of me that couldn’t hear. I got help. I came back different, not better, not wiser, just different, and still here.If you read that one, you already know the shape of the night. This isn’t a retelling of it.What I never told you is who was in the house while it was hap
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