. By the time I accepted that I had

. By the time I accepted that I had emotions that needed to be grieved, I had already arrived on Duke’s campus. Although the typical signs of grief were there, I didn’t know anyone well enough — and no one knew me well enough — to discharge some of the emotions I was hesitantly feeling. Luckily, at the beginning of my spring semester, my participation in Kathy Rudy’s Baldwin Scholars freshman seminar validated the importance of grief. My interaction with other Baldwin’s allowed me the ability to logically and emotionally make sense of what I was still feeling after nine years of ambiguous absence. With every step along the way, it became clear that letting go of my mother was the only way I would be able to live my life — a life in which I believed myself to be more than the daughter who wasn’t good enough to be loved by her mother.