“‘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”

from the outside. And I had spent so long inside that performance that I had stopped being able to distinguish them myself.

So I did what I had always done. I kept going. I attended class. I called home on Sundays. I performed.

The first Thanksgiving home, in November of 2008, was the one where it started to get harder. My mother had already begun researching continue reading …