HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.
I stare out at the sky. The man next to me is snoring, mouth wide open. His head drops forward, jolting back upright. It’s February. If the year had gone as planned, I would not have been on this airplane. I would have been finishing breakfast with my roommates and walking to class. Tonight, they will make dinner without me. We won’t dress up together this weekend, sifting through each other’s closets, to attend a party where we drink too much and laugh too hard. I am leaving home.
Read MoreWe’re a few hours in when something starts to go wrong with the epidural. Not all at once, but a creeping awareness of sensation starts to tug at my attention as I lie there and look at the trees outside, and read, and make small talk with my husband.
At first, I ignore it. But then I start to get nervous.
“I can wiggle my left toes,” I say, not really to anyone. Observationally.
Read MoreOnce a year at the place I work we have this training. It starts off like most trainings you’d have at your work. Everyone comes together, complaining that they have better things to do than be here at this. You find your friends and sit together and talk about your day so far. We have an expert come in and talk to us, and then we do some group work on the topic and call it a day. It’s a workplace training that myself and the people I work with are used to. It’s a training for what to do if there an active shooter in my building. My building is an elementary school that is filled with 800 children everyday. The active shooter training is the one we dread the most. We are educators, not police or military. We are experts in reading, and math, not barricading and disarming. Yet, there we are. Learning how to do those very things from some very brave police officers.
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