I’m pretty sure every girl goes through a “horse phase” at one point or another. Maybe it’s because we’re peddled Marguerite Henry, C.W. Anderson, and Walter Farley books early on in our youth. Maybe it’s just because horses are pretty. Whatever the reason, I and all my friends played with Breyer horses, drew pictures of horses, and ran around the school playground pretending were were jockeys.

Watching the Triple Crown races with my mom was a large part of my “horse phase.” She told me stories about picking her favorite horse with her sisters during the post parade during her childhood, and she and I did the same together.

Admittedly, after 20 years of watching a Triple Crown drought I got a little jaded toward this tradition. I still enjoyed watching, I still picked a favorite, but my inexperienced heart had been broken too many times by spoiler horses to expect anything of greatness. By the time American Pharoah rolled around, I was barely paying attention.

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Roseanne Barr said something racist and her show got cancelled. There’s no need to spend a lot of time re-hashing what was said or why; Barr has a long history of racist vitriol, and it was only a matter of time before ABC decided she wasn’t worth keeping on their payroll.

The aftermath of Roseanne’s cancellation resulted in more than simple backlash from her fans. Her show was regarded as the sitcom for Trump supporters, so a comment from the Trump administration was certain.

The result was a nearly two-minute speech from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in which she began the “but what about MY apology” circuit.

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For several years I have volunteered for an organization that partners with internationals attending our local university. By picking them up from the airport, helping them buy winter coats, hosting a weekly community dinner, and connecting them to neighborhood resources, the goal is to ensure that international students and their families are made to feel welcomed and loved.

Welcoming and loving foreigners is a distant concept to much of America today. Americans voted in 2016 based on “cultural anxiety.” Attacks against people of color in the form of white supremacist rallies and police shootings have been exposed. A country that prides itself in aligning with “Christian” morality has come to a point where Christians are the least likely to accept responsibility for refugees. Most recently, immigrants have been indefinitely separated from their children, and thousands of undocumented children have been subsequently lost.

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February 14, 2008, I was at after-school rehearsal for my high school’s spring play when a classmate looked at her phone and exclaimed to us all that there had been a shooting at Northern Illinois University, the college just up the road.

This was before widespread cell phone access among teens, and there certainly were no smart phones. The rest of us without phones had no way of getting in touch with our parents and no way to look up exactly where and when the shooting took place. This was particularly alarming for me because my dad worked for NIU. For all I knew, my dad had been shot.

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I have been casually making videos on YouTube since 2010. Back then, YouTube was not a career goal, and analytics and algorithms were practically unheard of. People made videos because they enjoyed it. They made videos because it was a creative outlet. They made videos to find a sense of community.

I am still in that place. I don’t make videos consistently enough to earn money or to garner a plethora of views, but that doesn’t matter to me. The friendships I have made through the YouTube community and the things I’ve learned from those friendships are more valuable to me than trends or clickbait or AdSense earnings. It’s difficult for some people to understand, but I make videos because I like to make them, and that’s that.

I recently was confronted about this.

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I recently started a new job as a retail display coordinator. Having been with my company for five years I assumed people would have a vague understanding of the display branch and, therefore, what I would be doing in my new position. Not so. A few dozen tragic conversations later, I’ve discovered it’s incredibly difficult to grasp.

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Photography and styling by me.
Modeling courtesy of Neha Minhas.

Photography and styling by me.
Modeling courtesy of Ellen Svehla: @el.svehla

My church’s caring ministry is affiliated with GriefShare, an international grief support program. The first holiday season after my dad passed away, I went to a GriefShare Surviving the Holiday seminar. Going in, I didn’t think I had a lot to gain from it; I had already gone through several “firsts” with my dad’s birthday and father’s day, so the first round of holidays without Dad didn’t seem like a big deal.
However, as I went through the seminar, I realized I probably wasn’t as prepared as I thought, and I ended up gaining a few pearls of wisdom that I’ve taken with me over the years:

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