“Hands where I can see them!” I hollered, my water gun pointing at my dad, my yellow construction paper “sheriff's badge”-clad chest swelling with the pride of victory right before the two of us burst into hysterical laughter in the middle of the woods. My mom was always the social one in my three-person family; she loved going to big dinners and taking friends on group ski trips. My dad and I were more reserved. We did not deign...

I’ve always hated when Polish-Americans “anglo-fy” their Polish (speak Ponglish?). I’m not referring to the adoption of words like “cool” and “super” into the vocabulary, but to what linguists call “code-switching”—replacing a Polish word with an English one, often when unable to recall the proper term in conversation. According to linguistics, this is a completely normal occurrence for multilinguals, but I’ve always avoided it because of how code-switching often results in the muddling of one’s...

Throughout my high school career, I’ve experienced a cognitive dissonance familiar to many other first-generation American students. My parents grew up in communist Poland and, to them, higher education is to be taken advantage of in the most pragmatic way, regardless of intellectual interest, to be able to provide for one’s family and country. As someone who, to my parents’ chagrin, has always split her love between theatre—specifically playwriting—and fields that, to them, seem more practical, ...

The humid air on that rainy spring evening managed to abruptly go from pleasantly warm to suffocating in a matter of seconds. The peaceful rumble of car tires on the sodden streets was suddenly frantic, as if the machines couldn’t wait to reach their happier destinations. There was no wind. Absolute silence boomed in my ears as my mother finally told me why my dad had been missing work for the past few weeks, sending me down the road...