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What Are We Doing Here?

Stephanie Here and Now
6 min readApr 24, 2024

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Considering the Eastern Horizon, photo by the author.

What kind of person do you want to be today? The kind who rolls over and goes back to sleep? Or the kind who goes up the mountain?

That was my question, every morning, for a month at my mother’s in Victoria. I would wake up around 6:00 a.m. full of the knowledge that the sun would be out for maybe twenty minutes, from the top of Christmas Hill, before it was swaddled in clouds for the rest of the day.

The bed was set up in a corner of her garden suite living room. My sister had taken over the rest of the house and while she did have a spare bedroom, I was not welcome there. My sister, over the years, had gradually come to dominate my mother, using her as a housekeeper and full-time nanny as she juggled her low-paying receptionist job with an appaent full time devotion to online international love affairs. The house belonged to my mother but she lived there timidly, like the paid help. It was as miserable and degrading as it sounds.

Having crashed out my life in the middle of grad school, I was taking stock from my mother’s basement while all of my earthly belongings languished in a storage unit in Ottawa. I wanted to be in Austin, but that was impossible. I wanted my career to be doing better. That seemed impossible too. In journalism, as a woman, if you haven’t made yourself indispensable by age 30, and established your credentials as having been, at…

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Stephanie Here and Now
Stephanie Here and Now

Written by Stephanie Here and Now

American from Canada. Writer Researcher. I'm new around here.

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