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When Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June fifth and died on June sixth, I was eleven and we were living in London for the year on my father’s sabbatical from Rutgers. It was my mother’s birthday and she put her arms around myself and my two older sisters and said we would never go back to America. My parents had loved John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. who had been assassinated that April. The Vietnam War was raging, and the United States looked like a place you would willingly leave. But my father turned to my weeping mother and said, “Of course we’re going back. We have to go back. We’re Americans.” I was surprised by this. I thought of my parents as rebels, they protested the war, they supported all liberal causes, they were vocal and active in their beliefs. But they were also staunchly patriotic.

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Denial: “An unconscious thought process whereby one allays anxiety by refusing to acknowledge certain unpleasant facts, feelings, etc.” Uh huh. I got that. I was finishing the triathlon, the Olympic length, which I had not trained for, an activity my ex-husband had suggested as a means to bring us closer, never mind he was scarfing a free pirogi as I crossed the finish line. I denied what my body was telling me which was, “This is impossible.” Same message I received after 72 hours of back labor, after submitting a novel, after getting sober, after surviving the death of my sister. What did I do? I denied. I kept going. Denial isn’t gaslighting. You aren’t pretending one thing is true in place of another. You are simply postponing, rejecting, refusing so you can survive. My mother did it around my father’s drinking.

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Why did I become a writing coach? Because I had my first teaching job at Brooklyn College and faced with a classroom of Haitian immigrants, needed to learn how to teach writing. Not literature analysis, reading, or grammar. Writing using those aforementioned subjects, a sense of humor, a willingness to learn on my feet, and a deep empathy for my students struggling to remain in the United States, take care of their families and find jobs. They wrote about these things, and I found work by James Baldwin, Hemingway, Tillie Olsen, and articles in the newspaper, stories about assimilation, loss of home, and identity. We wrote and we read and I corrected their essays and found forms like letters home, poetry, and storytelling that helped them become better writers.

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