Hello readers! I have been away from home at a work conference since Sunday morning and desperately wanted to get this to you, but also whew, it has been a whirlwind. I just got back to my hotel room at 9:00 on Monday night and finally sat down to write. Consider this raw and unedited piece a gift from the heart …

I have been attempting to explain the fear of Y2K to middle schoolers, in the context of it being the setting of this year’s Newbery winner, and with every single class this has evolved into a discussion of fear of the unknown. A student inevitably chortles when I start describing just how SCARED we all were, how my friends and I chose to hold our New Year’s Eve party that year in a cabin in the woods just in case, how it inspired widespread doomsday prepping, etc. 

All of this to help them understand the state of mind of the main character in The First State of Being, whose anxiety in the fall of 1999 is rational and expected given our understanding of the situation at that time. I remind them over and over that it’s easy to look back on something we were petrified about and minimize those feelings because everything turned out fine ~ but the entire BASIS of that fear and anxiety is not knowing what would happen and how things would turn out.