Renaissance Weekend changed me--made me question everything I thought I knew about who I was and how I was perceived. But it also opened my eyes and forced me to confront some of my own prejudices and stereotypes. I guess my ultimate take away is that one person's remarkable might be another's so, so ordinary, so we all better get comfortable defining ourselves for ourselves and keep trying to shake off what other people seem to think.
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Just my luck
For one moment, the Earth stopped spinning and everything stood completely still as I darted my eyes out to the gaping-mouthed crowd. Then it started up again, and I turned my full attention to the audience, determined to take control of this preposterous moment...
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Taking tea and enjoying the journey
I took this trip as much for my former self as I did for my present self. That girl had great big dreams in spite of her challenging reality. In the face of economic struggle, she taught her young son to enjoy the simple act of afternoon tea and other little joys. She wouldn’t have believed she could ever even seriously contemplate a trip like this.
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Set up to win…if you are white, which I am, so I did
I never doubted that Quinn and I would get out of our circumstances. I certainly didn't know how I was going to ever earn much money, but it was just a given that I would eventually pull us out of that poverty and into the middle class. In fact, it was such a given that until I read this article earlier this week, I could never have even articulated this very notion. It was as factual to me as breathing or blinking or walking--nothing to think about because it's just a simple fact.
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What does your path look like?
This time around, I have let my mind, my gloriously creative imagination, wander to what ifs that are actually within my grasp. I'm not exactly sure how I'll get there, but that's part of the journey that I think you can't understand until you've walked a pretty significant piece of it.
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Committed to it all
So today I sit in my sunroom, overlooking the yard where we happily celebrated making this commitment to each other 12 years ago, and think, as I often have done in these past three years, what if I hadn't held on?
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Until my throat is raw
I have lived an incredibly privileged life, and I have never felt physically threatened by people who are tasked with keeping me safe.
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Maybe math does have all the answers
What is much more interesting to me now is to consider who I am today because of that terrible night, exactly 25 years ago.
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Watch. Hit rewind. Play again.
We repainted our bedroom yesterday; a task we have been talking about for nearly as long as we have been married (one week short of 12 years). Social isolation has given us the time to do a ton of house projects, and I am grateful. The verdict is still out on the bedroom for me, despite the fact that I picked the color, but I am glad we did something in there. Aside: When Quinn was young, he was obsessed with Space Jam and watched it over and over for about three years. Dr Marry tells this funny story of one of the first nights he was babysitting. They were building LEGOs and…
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Just some (more) existential thoughts from this week
On a walk with Dr Marry, I had one of those exploding lightbulb moments where I realized that my entire adult life I have self-sabotaged my own success, my next move. The roadblocks I have encountered have not been accidental: I have absolutely designed and installed them to keep me from pursuing so many things. That infuriates me to think of all I haven't achieved because I stopped myself.