They Missed My PhD Graduation—So I Used The Empty Seats To Tell The Truth

that would go unused. At five-year-old me beaming at the camera with nothing but absolute belief in the world’s fairness and goodness.

I typed:

Me: I’ll try.

A lie. We both knew it. A polite fiction we maintained for appearance’s sake.

I set my phone down and went back to slide 42, but the words had lost all meaning. Closed-loop feedback, neural plasticity,continue reading …