Month: July 2017

A new article about the myth of meritocracy really hit home for me this week. The article cites a newly published study in the journal of Child Development that suggests that young people of color who grow up believing in the American dream, show a decline in self esteem during middle school. This is one of those reports that I find validates things we already knew. The myth of pulling yourself up by your booth straps to recognized success completely crumbled for me in grad school. In fact, I was surprised how hard this reality hit me since I assumed I had known the truth about meritocracy (and I even taught about meritocracy!). I was an older graduate student. Coming out of the corporate world, I was different from my peers…

I've always kept a journal. I wrote out my frustrations, my daily musings about life and happiness. I was an irregular writer. So I have 10-15 journals, some half filled. I abandoned them when I became bored with myself and the things I was writing about--which was often. In my moving process, I came across some old journals, previously forgotten, hidden under layers of dust in my storage unit. These journals were more time-specific. They were journals from a trip I had gone on about 15 years ago. I had forgotten they existed. I read through some of it last night and it made me cringe. I can hardly remember the young woman who wrote those entries. Did she really feel that way? Was that what it was like to…