In my first Longreads essay, I consider the value of door-to-door canvassing, phone-banking, and other anonymous tasks of everyday activism.

“I was surprised by how easily I became this person, this pesky do-gooder, this purveyor of obviousness. My high-school English teachers had instructed me to avoid clichés — if you want people to bother reading you, then you must find an original way to tell the story. This became a guiding principle not just in my writing, but in my speech, too, as it was for all my writer friends in New York City, where I had lived until 2012. There, nearly everyone I knew tried to obey the golden rule of conversation: If you can’t think of something interesting to say, don’t say anything at all.”

You can read the full essay on  Longreads:

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