What if, instead of being diagnosed—being called mentally ill—what if I had been able to receive care for its own sake. To be in distress, to ask for care, to receive it. What if there were space in this world for care.

The standard of care in orthodontics is thus to instruct the person to wear the retainer forever. This is in line with the general trend of modern medicine to focus on the maintenance of chronic diseases, rather than dealing with their causes.

The biggest hits—be they Coca-Cola or Doritos or Kraft’s Velveeta Cheesy Skillets dinner kits—owe their success to formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!

Our brain’s performance is being gravely manipulated, resulting in behaviors that leave us more lonely, anxious, depressed, distrustful, illness-prone, and overweight than ever before. At the same time, we feel disconnected from ourselves, from others, and from the world at large.

These past forty years have witnessed the twin epidemics of the negative extremes of both of these emotions: addiction (from too much pleasure) and depression (from not enough happiness).

When fear stops us from asking questions, it stops us from solving treatable problems.

Diagnosis is a gatekeeping process, and it slams its heavy bars in the face of anyone who is too poor, too busy, too Black, too feminine, too queer, and too gender nonconforming, among others.

“The clearest evidence that justice is the most important of all the virtues comes from what happens when you remove it. It’s remarkably stark: The presence of injustice instantly renders any act of virtue—courage, discipline, wisdom—any skill, any achievement, worthless…or worse.”

The great promise of gene editing is that it will transform medicine. The peril is that it will widen the healthcare divide between rich and poor.

Something about today feels so full of hope.

We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.

Anxiety works by anticipating and inhibiting. It says: Don’t do that, you’ll get hurt. Don’t do that, you’ll be disappointed. Don’t do that, you’ll embarrass yourself. Anxiety likes routine. It likes predictability. It likes knowing outcomes.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway was that modern medicine does not really have a handle on when and how to treat the chronic diseases of aging that will likely kill most of us.

The cult of the self prioritizes the needs of the individual while disregarding the needs of others.

There was no way I was waking up every morning to face myself.

No dark fate determines the future. We do. Each day and each moment, we are able to create and re-create our lives and the very quality of human life on our planet. This is the power we wield.

Talk less, get more. This book is about learning how to engage with the world in ways that give us an advantage.

The commonsense rules of the “real world” are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.

And when we make mistakes—when we fail to lead—our identity; our sense of self; our self-esteem; our deeply held beliefs about what it will take to feel loved and safe and that we belong, as well as that most the basic ability to provide for ourselves and our loved ones, seems to implode.

Being different conditions you toward cautiousness, even as it demands that you be bold.