The independent news organization of Duke University
When we try to slip back into these previous patterns of existence, we jut out like misfitting puzzle pieces. Our lives are split into two halves, and somewhere along the way, there emerges two of us.
Instead of perceiving crying as a weapon against our ego, we must conceptualize it as a vehicle of vulnerability, one that allows us to form stronger connections with others by revealing an emblem of our shared humanity.
Our conceptions of small towns ooze through filters percolating for idealism, signaling a place so untouched by external corruption that we always wish to return.
I have been warned to choose between being loud and assertive or being a woman.
Such hypocrisy is indicative of the problematic nature of American exceptionalism—the belief that America, with its foundations rooted in democracy and freedom, occupies a unique mantle in modern history and thus assumes the responsibility to play a distinctive role on the world stage.
"Well, you don't seem like you're from Mississippi."
Their exhibitions of hysteria represented an attempt to seize masculine power, and it was the doctor’s job to return them to their natural feminine state---keeping them captive in their sickness.
I had contracted the virus when it no longer dominated media headlines, creating distance between its harrowing physical impacts and other people’s perceptions. Nor did Duke provide the same wealth of resources for those quarantined as it did earlier in the pandemic.