“‘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”

that is almost invisible. You sit at enough tables and hear the word dropout applied to you with such casual certainty that some part of you, however small, begins to wonder whether you made the right call, whether the thing you’ve given your life to has been worth it in the ways that can’t be put on a clearance form.

That doubt was the actual cost,continue reading …