“‘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”
I closed my introduction to constitutional law textbook within 72 hours of arriving on campus and knew, without being able to articulate it yet, that I was in the wrong place. Not the wrong school, not the wrong city—the wrong direction entirely.
It was the most disorienting kind of certainty, knowing something clearly about yourself while being continue reading …
