7: Coloring in the Blackout Days

Blackout Days. I had grown so accustomed to not being able to celebrate myself because of blackout days—those times during the academic year where all staff were expected to be at work, no exceptions. Not even your birthday. Without knowing I traded in the very first gift I got—birth—to help college students and their families move in at colleges and universities across the United States. After more than a decade of blackout days, uncelebrated birthdays, missed family reunions, and unattended graduations, something exceptional happened. In that moment of exception, the loss of my father, I realized how many other things I lost, on the road to success. In that moment I had to learn how to love myself, and care about myself in ways that colored those days back in.