It's finally September, and though the heartbreak of summer being more or less over might be dragging you down -- maybe you'll find joy in reading some of the best stuff you might have missed this week.
For Buzzfeed Ideas Gena-mour Barrett writes about what debt has taught her about money. The personal essay focuses on her childhood and speaks about her mother's debt and how it taught her lessons of resilience, survival and hard work:
"Watching my mother struggle under debt’s colossal weight had some serious repercussions on the both us. My mum paid off her debt slowly: a homeowner loan and a personal loan, and settling with brokers to hand over every last penny she could afford. She managed to pay off the debt when I was 12, but by then our house had been irreversibly tainted by an oppressive concern with money. “Can’t afford” and “too expensive” were phrases I often heard leave my mother’s lips, and always with a hint of guilt, as if she were apologising for the fact her money alone would never be enough to provide for the both of us. Spending unnecessarily was absolutely taboo, and this fear of never having enough money mutated seamlessly into a dogged fixation with earning money. Here was my third lesson: the significance of work."
This week over at The Hairpin, Fariha Roisin and Sara Black McCulloch continued their Self Care series in which they converse with various women about self-care. This week, they had a conversation with writer and organizer Hannah Giorgis about self-care and depression. The conversation covered everything from ancestral baggage to how depression lies to us:
"One of depression’s biggest lies is that you are not enough, that you are never enough. And if that insidious voice is never going to go away, it feels especially important to dedicate time and effort and resources to a loving—if also quiet and sometimes wavering—internal counter-narrative. That isn’t going to just come one day! It takes work. It is labor."
At The Toast, editor Nicole S. Chung interviewed Celeste Ng, author of bestselling novel Everything I Never Told You. The interview touches on Ng's writing process, interracial families and the representation of Asians in the media. Like anyone belonging to a group that's underrepresented, Ng talks about how though things are getting better -- there's still a long way to go:
"There are more Asians represented in media, but they’re still so rare that every sighting is like spotting an ivory-billed woodpecker or something. We still need more representation, and we’re still fighting some of the same old stereotypes. It was great to see Jeremy Lin get the spotlight, but the narrative was always about his Asianness and how he met — or didn’t meet — the stereotypes we have for Asian men. "
Finally, this story that appears in Collectors Weekly about Madam C.J. Walker who built a hair-care company from noting and became one of the early 20th century's most powerful African Americans. Her life story and accomplishments are remarkable, considering all the adversity she faced growing up the daughter of former slaves:
"The details of Madam Walker’s early life are hazy: She was born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, in 1867 to sharecropper parents who worked on a cotton plantation where they were previously enslaved. Both Sarah’s parents passed away by the time she was 7, and she moved with her sister Louvenia and her sister’s husband to Vicksburg, Mississippi, just across the river. Sarah didn’t have the chance to attend school, and from around age 10, she began doing the difficult manual work of a laundress, which gave her a glimpse of the luxurious lifestyles enjoyed by some of Vicksburg’s white families."
