“‘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”

time.

Your work speaks.

I had spent 11 years doing work that could not speak. Not at dinner tables, not in family photos, not in the moments when Michelle Cross introduced me as the woman who had thrown her future away.

The idea that my work might speak somewhere, even if not there, felt like a permission I had been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.continue reading …