I was educated in a deeply kind of un-politically-correct way. I went to St. John's College which is this kind of Great Books school which is equally popular with hardcore conservatives who want their kids to read the Great White Men canon and sort of free-thinking liberals like my parents.
Lydia PolgreenOnce I came out in college I just have always been out and at work with pretty much everybody. My wife and I both working as journalists, because she's a photographer, and often working together, would have to kind of navigate this weird world. When you're trying to develop sources, when you're trying to you know make personal connections with people, you inevitably want to share things about yourself and that can be really tricky.
Lydia PolgreenTo me we're living in this very profoundly non-idealogical time where the real divide is between people who have power and people who either don't have power or feel that they don't have power.
Lydia PolgreenI think, I just always carry this kind of happy sense of being able to come into any situation and know that I don't exactly fit in, but I can make a place for myself.
Lydia PolgreenI have this very kind of like heterodox idea of what an education is, what underpins identity. I don't think I'm very easily pigeon holed in any of those boxes, so I confront this. I have a staff full of young people who came up in a very different tradition and who feel very fired up about the big identity battles. I listen and I try to navigate them, but I don't find them mapping onto my life in a personal way which is, which is hard.
Lydia PolgreenI think I'm this sort of perpetual outsider, I grew up most of my life in countries that were neither where I was born nor where either of my parents were from. I was part of a weird religion that nobody had heard of.
Lydia PolgreenI think all of us in the pursuit of more perfect version of the truth and the story need to reckon with what we bring to the story, and I think that I'm confronting that in a very real way everyday. I'm extremely proud of who I am and it's nice to see it celebrated, but if someone were to ask me to list in order the biography, you know journalist comes first.
Lydia Polgreen