“‘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”

directly. Not what should I be doing, or what have I been told I will be doing, but what would I run toward if the architecture of everyone else’s expectations didn’t exist?

I wrote it in a journal I kept under my bed.

I didn’t answer it right away, but I started paying attention differently to the things that made me feel like I was inside my own life continue reading …