Understatement: Sarah is a reader. True statement (which may sound exaggerated but isn’t): Sarah has read over 200 books so far this year. She’s the voracious reader I wish I was and imagined I’d be when I was younger. Real books, e-books, audiobooks – she eats them all up. The area beside our bed is a minefield, where she’ll have 30 or so books within reach. (She only reads two or three at once, but she likes to have options.) Her interests are broad , and it’s easier to list off what she doesn’t like: sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. She also doesn’t love depressing fiction, but she has read some of the most depressing-sounding non-fiction that you’ve ever heard of. Falling Home: Creating a Life That Catches You When You Fall, If I Knew Then: Finding Wisdom in Failure and Power in Aging, Invisible Women: Data Bias In a World Designed by Men; What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resistance, and Healing . True story – one night in bed, I rolled over around three in the morni
My first draft of this began, "Sarah is not afraid of having difficult conversations." And from the outside, that seems very true. When she argues with someone who's being deliberately ignorant, or when she tells a friend or family member something they need to know but don't want to hear – she does it with confidence and conviction. These are the conversations that most people would rather dive off a cliff then have, and she marches right into them, seemingly without fear. But that’s only the way it appears. She feels the same deep discomfort as you and I do, but pushes through that to say what needs to be said. About half the time, it’s the choleric in her that makes her speak up. When someone is promoting a mistruth, especially a dangerous one, she’s all over them. Anti-vaxxers beware because (in her own words) vaccination is the hill she will always die on. She regularly takes on relatives (of mine, sadly) who post White Lives Matter-style garbage on social media