7 Essays To Read This Week: Changing Names, Instagram Filters, And Boredom

A year after taking her husband's last name, Esther Werdiger is finally beginning to understand why she felt so uneasy about her decision. For BuzzFeed Ideas, she recounts the confusion and anxiety she felt. "I felt as if I’d failed Feminism 101, or something along those lines, and it upset me," Werdiger writes. Read it here.

Instagram's numerous skin-lightening filters are problematic when applied to people of color. Morgan Jerkins conducted an experiment, examining the photos of five women before and after they were filtered. She found that the modified images "have both racial and cultural implications." Read her essay at Racked.

At what stage does curiosity about women, indulged or not, give women the permission to call themselves queer? In a BuzzFeed LGBT essay, Shannon Keating explains how queer women aren't "just experimenting" and asks why female queerness continues to be qualified, belittled, and disbelieved. Read her piece at BuzzFeed LGBT.

After losing 100 pounds in a year, Alasdair Wilkins reflects on what he's learned from the experience. In an essay for Vox, he explains how he's more confident now but wishes he could have found a way to be comfortable in his own body before his transformation. Read it at Vox.

There's been a lot of fuss over the way women talk — and how they ought to change the way they speak in order to be taken seriously. For The Cut, Ann Friedman asks why. "...Are women the ones who need to change?," she writes. "If I’m saying something intelligent and all a listener can hear is the way I’m saying it, whose problem is that?" Read it at The Cut.

For much of her life and especially as she neared adulthood, Anna McConnell feared being a boring person. "I began to dread moments where I might be letting my mind drift ... I identified moments where I wasn’t thinking 'productive' thoughts as 'boring' moments. This isn’t to say that I necessarily felt bored; rather, I felt anxious about being boring," she writes in a Rookie piece. In it, she reflects on her anxieties and reflects on how boredom can actually be a good thing. Read her highly relatable ode to boredom at Rookie.

For years, Magenta Ranero tried to hide her Asperger's. After years of therapy, however, she has realized there is no such thing as "normal" and has begun to accept her disorder. "I try to remember that I’m different, and that difference is also what makes me me," she writes for The Toast. "While I may not have it together all the time, I try hard, and I exist, and I care about people, and that’s what really matters." Read it at The Toast.