“If you scared, say you scared,” is one of my father’s favorite lines. I remember it most from childhood basketball games. On sunny, summer afternoons in Milwaukee, my father and I would walk to the nearest park to play one-on-one. With the ball in my hands, I would dribble up the lane, working for a shot, and when I found one, I would hesitate—scared of making a mistake, afraid of making a move, struggling to believe in myself. He’d face me, arms out or up or both, and say, “If you scared, say you scared.” I wore that fear like a second skin well into the realities of adulthood. I might have been afraid, but I’d never say it.

When I started lactating in 2006, it scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t pregnant: I hadn’t slept with a man in over two years. At the time, I was in graduate school to earn an MFA and was initially too consumed with writing and drinking and working multiple day jobs to visit a doctor. Three months passed before I finally went to Planned Parenthood and was referred to a women’s health center on Chicago’s northside, thankful for their sliding scale. They ran levels for all sorts of hormones, and mine were all in normal range except one—prolactin. This pituitary gland hormone that induces lactation in the breast is usually less than 30. Mine was 145.