It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they'd read me cover to cover as I'd read them.

There was something alienating about being on scholarship, a tense mixture of gratefulness and otherness. You're talented, the money said, and we want you here. Still, it had the twang of You were, are, and always will be different.

Here, I choose to love what I have. Here, I choose to love what I am now