“‘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”

there is a period after the decision is made and before it is enacted where you have to live inside the gap between the two versions of yourself: the version your family expects and the version you are becoming.

I lived in that gap for three months between my OCS application and the conversation with my mother. I went to class. I took my exams. I received continue reading …