YOUR ABSENCE BELONGS TO ME

A poignant, intimate essay on identity.

The author lost her father to cancer when she was 16 years old. Before he died, he set out to give his daughter the tools she needed to become a free-thinking, confident, cultured, improper, disruptive, selfish feminist who has better things to do than apologize. Today this thirty-something woman has come to see how she had these values and this personality drilled into her in a hurry. As she seeks to explore the building blocks of her self in this intimate essay, her quest leads her to interview other people who have grown up in less than conventional circumstances. “When you've had a certain way of being dictated to you, how can you figure out your true identity if you don't put the person you've always been behind you?”

EXCERPT
Does abandonment run in the family? My father ran away, so does that make me a woman incapable of putting down roots? Am I genetically more prone than other women to walk away from it all, life, kids and everything? Of all the things he put on the agenda, commitment was never one of them. That's pretty much all I know right now. And when I look back, I can't say I'm doing any better than he did on that front.

Rose-Aimée Automne T.
Morin became a researcher
when she emerged from
Université du Québec à
Montréal in 2011. She was
editor-in-chief for Urbania
magazine from 2015 to 2018
and still contributes articles
to the print version and
blog posts for the website.
She has also hosted and
appeared on a number of
TV shows.