In another reality, this morning I landed in Sydney. In that same reality - the one that was until it wasn’t - I was spending six weeks with my best friend and her newborn baby in a faraway country, taking myself on little adventures in a new city, wondering how my plants were doing. I was (finally!) going to the Great Barrier Reef - an overnight on a tour boat and a day trip to a nearby waterfall. I was going to visit old friends, maybe go to Melbourne. I booked the flight to Sydney a few months into her pregnancy; my job could travel, why not move it to her.

Then the world changed.

‘Tis the season for lists and reflections! As the year and the decade alike come to a close it’s hard to resist doing some kind of inventory. I have to admit, I can’t fully deal with the end-of-a-decade-compare-contrast (thinking in depth about my 24 year old self feels like a lot) so I’m going to table that for some journal entry somewhere. Suffice it to say, the first half of this decade was in my twenties, Philadelphia, and partnership, and the second half was in my thirties, New York, and single. What a world!

There’s this phrase that nonprofits love to add to job listings - “salary commensurate with experience.” I’m not sure where this phrase came from, I assume some very clever marketer who was tasked with coming up with a phrase that makes you *sound* generous but gives you the option to not be if you don’t wanna. It has become my (current, give me 20 minutes and I’ll find a new one) bane of existence.

This year has been a hard time to be a woman. New allegations are coming forth against Brett Kavanaugh, our President is a known abuser, and people across the country are being (re)re-traumatized; abortion access is on the chopping block; women are once again being labeled “unelectable.” I’ve talked before about how important female friends are in waiting out the storm. But in the last couple of weeks I have had loving, charming conversations with some old, male friends and so let’s talk about the power of friendships between men and women.

When I was in elementary school, I spent an alarming amount of time in the living room with all of the lights out, head shoved into the corner of the couch (the only comfortable position I could find) listening to the rest of my family having dinner in the room next door. Sometimes I ended up sleeping on the (beautifully cold) bathroom floor after hours of (apologies) throwing up.

Yesterday (or maybe it was a couple days ago. Truly who knows), after this long writing hiatus that I clearly just went on, I had about 17 things I wanted to write about. Today, as I sit here typing, I have no idea what any of them were.

I debated for the last 24 hours if I should write about what’s happening to abortion rights or if I should write about literally anything else so I could not think about it for a minute. But here we are (Sunset and Kansas!*). I’m full of feelings. Let’s do it.

One thing first: access to abortion is not just about women. It’s about anyone who can get pregnant and it’s about anyone who can get anyone pregnant.

I think a lot about Otherness - both my proximity and distance from it and the way that Otherness shapes my life, my work and my relationships.

As previously mentioned, I grew up on a dairy farm in Virginia. Many people that I met in my post-Virginian life are surprised by that - by the Southernness, the country-ness (rurality?), the actual farm. We were a family of transplants in a county made up of poor to middle class families who had been there for generations. It was well acquainted with racial Otherness (see this essay on the desegregation of the high schools in 1969), but only in the context of Black vs. White. My family was a different kind of Other that no one really knew what to do with.