“‘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”

let the word get close enough to become familiar.

What I know now, from the other side of it, is that familiar isn’t the same as true.

If someone in your life is being dismissed for a path no one around them can read, if you know someone whose work happens in the quiet, in the unseen, in the places that don’t make it into family conversations, tell them.continue reading …