Elvira Cordileone

In the 1970s and 1980s, I was in my prime. The economy flourished, I had a good education, and jobs were easy to find. If I'd known what I wanted to do, I could have made a plan and grabbed everything life had to offer with both hands. But I had no idea what path to take. I floated from job to job. None of my starter jobs suited me. They bored me to distraction. If only I'd had the wisdom and the patience to stay at one or two of them and work my way up. veal deep emtions,help us Our Our...

I felt lived buried by depression and didn't know it I reread the words I penned in a tiny notebook in the 1970s when I was in my twenties, and I feel sorry for the kid I found there. I thought I was at fault for failing at just about everything: as a daughter; as a student; as a friend; as the would-be girlfriend of a cute guy I knew. Back then, I hoped to have a job I loved, a steady boyfriend if not a fiancé, a place of my own and more besides. I blamed my shortcomings on something...

What follows is a series of diary entries from my early twenties—years shaped by my Italian parents’ expectations, Quebec’s cultural upheaval, and my own struggle to claim a self. This “almost” relationship, the failure of hoped for young love with a fellow student seems trivial on the surface, but at the time the pain of rejection cracked something open in me: the realization that my disappointment with men was tangled up with deeper questions about belonging, trust, and how much of myself...