Let self-rediscovery guide you to authentic living and working in a post-pandemic world.

When I was in sixth grade, my language arts teacher asked us to write a story in our journals. I think it was Halloween or something. When the time was up, she asked if anyone wanted to share. I raised my hand, and I read my story to the class. After I finished, I heard whispers from around the room.

That was really good.

Wow, that’s way better than mine.

I didn’t know she could write like that.

Nobody did. I had been writing for as long…

“Do they know I’m human yet?”

This is the ambient question for characters of color, particularly black women, in Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections. Supported by issues like identity, the treatment of black women’s bodies, systemic racism, and white privilege just to name a few, this question guides each story in the collection in a unique way.

Ultimately, the answer is no. ‘They’ do not know [she/he/they] is/are human. This white denial of black humanity manifests itself in different ways with different outcomes, but the answer is still always no.

There is so much to unpack in these…

The best and worst year of my life

I found out I was pregnant in November of 2019, just a few months before the coronavirus sent the world into a collective upheaval. My husband and I had been trying to conceive for a little over a year, so although we knew it was a possibility, we were pleasantly surprised if not cautiously optimistic. I was teaching, and the flu that year was rough. …

No, really. It is.

I am a TV snob. I’ll be the first to admit it. Mad Men was my first TV love, and goddamnit, it was just so good. It ruined me.

Maybe I’m a little nostalgic for the feeling I used to get watching it. My then-boyfriend-now-husband and I were living in a farmhouse with four or five other people just outside the town where we were going to college. We’d all cram into one of our rooms, sprawl out on the bed, the floor, the computer chairs, and worship at the church of Sterling Cooper Draper Price.

…

I am a teacher, or I used to be. For six years I taught at the middle school level in a small town in Ohio. If you’re not familiar with teaching or the world of public education, you may not know that most classrooms are now, what is called, co-taught. The general education teacher is paired with an intervention specialist and, in some cases, they cohabitate in the same classroom. The idea is that the two work and teach together to serve both typical and special education students.

In my six years as a general education teacher, I had four…