“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

ever sat at a table and been introduced as the thing you are not—the failure, the dropout, the disappointment, the one who never lived up to what someone else decided your life should be—I want you to hear this.

The work you are doing matters.

The choices you made that no one around you can read, the sacrifices that don’t appear in any family photo, continue reading …