girlonahalfshill

“Content Warning” is a book about resilience through perseverance and empathy. It’s an unflinching look at my life through the eyes of those around me. Our lives don’t offer us a single hurdle to surmount. One success or failure doesn’t define us, so why should the stories we tell encourage such oversimplification?

While we continue to introduce ourselves by stating our job titles, the average American nowadays will hold more than twelve jobs in their lifetime, and for every person who finds a company job that lasts for decades, someone else doubles the average. We’ve never confronted a time when stability felt so out of reach. In an age of hyperconnectivity, when authenticity has become a buzzword, many of us feel increasingly isolated and cynical about the world around us and our ability to find meaningful relationships.

My life has offered me plenty of opportunities, extraordinary moments and adventures, but most of them don’t fall within these pages. If you want to hear about them, we should sit down to lunch. What I’m sharing here are the difficult moments that don’t get talked about over coffee, the times we usually face alone. The stories are fictionalized and anonymous because I want to ask as many of us as possible to stand in the room, to see ourselves among the people in each situation and try to accept that we’re all human.

I hope there’s something here for everyone to relate to — because who hasn’t lost someone precious to them, felt violated, hurt someone they tried to care for, found ingratitude when they expected fulfillment. There are also plenty of reasons for anger and sadness, for offense. It’s in the title, after all. But I’m not aiming for offense as a rallying cry for censorship. I believe it’s worth the risk to be offended on occasion because it helps us figure out what we care about and where the boundaries of our known world lie.