This birthday was a difficult one for me - for reasons you'll read below. Lunch hall duty (in between active monitoring, of course) provided time for me to write through my feelings as I approached this milestone. I debated whether or not to share this highly personal journal entry, but ultimately, this is who I am at this moment, and I believe in the power of writing to work through difficult emotions. The process did prove cathartic, so I share as a reminder that writing works, and the harder it is to write about something, the more we need to do it. I'm not sure if what I ended up with is poetry, prose, or incoherent rambling, but here it is - raw and real. It needs revision and editing, but I'm not going to do it this time. What I wrote through glassy eyes between checking passers-by for their ID badges is what will remain.
Warning: plot spoilers ahead... It's funny. Sometimes, the films and books I enjoy the most are the ones that I initially approached with hesitancy or ambivalence. Having recently finished the second book in a row for our book club that I found merely mildly entertaining, I had no real hopes for Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven , which I had not even heard of prior to the suggestion by one of our club members. With no expectations in mind, I skimmed the comments on the back cover and inside flap, but they didn't give much away. Thus, I started reading with almost no information about the book, its author, or even its genre. I knew it was post-apocalyptic, but was it dystopian? Was it similar to Cormac McCarthy's The Road ? Would it feature a teen love story as depicted in both The Hunger Games trilogy and the Divergent series? I had several post-apocalyptic stories in mind as I began to read; boy was I surprised to find one that was different! Typically, aut...

Thank you. A good bit of our life experience overlaps
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