#social-distancing

My book club, @libercoven​, read Becoming Dangerous back in July, but I’ve been meaning to revisit some of the essays in that anthology for a while. Luckily the first prompt for week two of @studyonderly​‘s quarantine reading challenge pushed me to do just that. 

Here is that prompt:

Week 2. A Room of One’s Own

Originally this prompt is about gender identity and women’s literature, but I’d like to expand it to include its literal words, along with other identities.

Any story that has to do with gender, or written by someone who identifies not as a cis man. Time to dig into the LGBT+ stories, gender theory, and queer/trans coded characters! Have you ever read a story about isolation or solitude? Literally or figuratively? Do you know a story that took place in a small, limited number of settings? 

With twenty-one essays in Becoming Dangerous, I didn’t want to revisit all of them for this prompt (besides not wanting this post to go one forever, I already wrote a response essay to “Unfuckable” by Cara Ellison, the first essay in the anthology), so I settled on “Before I was a Woman, I was a Witch” by Avery Edison.

Avery is a trans woman and in her essay, she talks about discovering who she was by way of looking at many of the things she realized she wasn’t (including a witch) and how she held onto piece of those things as she found a way to be confident with her identity both gender and simply as a person with interests and hobbies and a really great sense of humor (she’s a comedian). There is a lot of solitude in this piece even though we find out that what Avery was searching for was, in many ways social support from outside communities and herself. 

What I love about this piece is Avery’s honesty, not only the raw way that she approaches introducing us to the teenager who faced bullying, illness, and mental crisis while searching for who she was but also in her spiritual journey. It’s hard to admit that the things you explored weren’t for you or that you used them for appearance rather than spirituality, but she does that and goes on to share the ways that even as an atheist she understands spirituality and still has a personal practice. 

For this prompt, I originally created a Spotify playlist, but it overlapped too much and eventually ended up working better for the article I chose to read for the next prompt (stay tuned for my next post to see it!). Instead, I chose to do a collage of sorts with quotes from the essay. (A ‘/’ indicates the end of a quote fragment.)

Before I Was

I knew / you can only turn into “Bravery” / 

yet-another millennial told she has limitless potential. /

I was wrong. / Deprogramming my millennial illusions, / 

I’ve suffered; / I’ve tried to pretend. / All I needed was time, /

our local new age store, / and our past selves. /

A simple (and reductive) version, / I was never a real

witch, / but I’ve done extraordinary things in my life /

Is a coronavirus capable of making plans for our future? When the deadliness of one variant hampered Covid-19’s to spread, it went in another direction. Delta’s victims pretty quickly succumbed to a serious sickness. They weren’t able to transmit the virus efficiently. Up popped a new variant. Omicron gave milder symptoms but was far more contagious. There were immediate spikes in infection…

Corona Do’s and Dont’s:

It certainly does! And so there is no reason or excuse big enough to make you not follow these dos and Don’ts amid the outbreak of the biggest pandemic we are witnessing.

Schools & Covid-19: Distance, Masks, and Bubbles #UKEdChat at 8pm - See more at

#UKEdChat session 519.

Schools are banning face coverings!

Sharing best practice for social distancing.

Grade inflation has real impacts on the stress and work levels of teachers further up the chain

Click here to view the tweet archive.

How can the impacts of protective measures on learning be mitigated?

#UKEdChat session 519 – For context, after the longest time away from school that most…

This was the scene in Berlin, where an estimated 17,000 people defied social-distancing and mask requirements to join a protest supported by neo-Nazi groups, conspiracy theorists and others who said they were fed up with the restrictions. Read the latest. https://t.co/QFWyHTTMb0 pic.twitter.com/h9CuxYCERg