I have started drinking again. Not much, volume was never my issue; just enough to remind me why it's a bad idea. But I have been so good lately; kale at every other meal, cardio three times a week, leaning into discomfort to push back against avoidant patterns. Maybe this is a necessary correction, the subconscious warning that depleting willpower ( Read more... )

Rather than living well is the best revenge, which has always felt so intellectually dishonest it's borderline triggering, I think I prefer the inverse, which is to recognize that everyone is ultimately their own worst enemy, including the people whose attitudes and behaviors you have found the most consistently abhorrent.

So while people like ( Read more... )

It has been three years, and I'm still afraid to admit how I feel, as though if I apply too much scrutiny, the weight of my observation might provoke a collapse.

We go house hunting in November, and I'm fucking terrified.

Are you sure you don't want therapy, L - now a psychiatrist-in-training - asks half-jokingly, you've made so much headway by yourself, imagine how much more you could do with professional input.

He's not wrong. The problem, I think, is mostly the way the word professional now makes my guts twist in new unpleasant ways.

is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead.

My understanding of mental illness has looped back round on itself so many times I'm no longer sure where I'm at; is it ADHD or depression, ASD or anxiety, cluster C or disorganized attachment, disorder or divergence. I realize now that the obsession with ( Read more... )

I realize now, that all of the jaded adults in all of their jaded little offices were right. There are no answers in art, or poetry, or being the first to feel your special feelings with a depth and nuance that nobody else ever has.

I have come, I think, full circle.

Of course it isn't fair; fair is a rhetorical mirage. Everyone thinks they know what it means, nobody can agree on what.

Maybe that's all civilization is: enough people keeping things running while some of us have existential crises.

There's too much that falls short, too little that we can do, and yet. There is more than one truth, more than one world, more than one path. This is not always a comfort; some days you can scarcely bear the reminders. But on this day, in this moment, it is.

Each new generation of children has to be told: 'This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: 'This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.'

The Turtle Diary - Russell Hoban

Although all my uncles - living and dead - are also massive cunts, so it really shouldn't be a surprise.