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.

It occurred to him that a spell to make one’s enemies into idiots via the power of breasts might be immensely helpful. Then again, it might not be a spell. It might have only been the breasts.

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.

“Pain isn’t a competition,” I assure him. “There’s always enough to go around.”

The Western funeral home loves the word “dignity.” The largest funeral corporation has even trademarked the word. What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality.

And what was a home but somewhere you wouldn’t have to feel quite so alone.

How to apologize for wanting some word, some story, some beautiful thing for my own?

There is one indisputable way to identify a cult, one characteristic they all share. It is the notion that anyone who does not agree with the group’s beliefs or choices, who expresses concerns, who simply dares to ask questions, is deemed “unsafe.”

ts voice was like the wind, but also like a thousand trees thinking the same thought.

A person could work and work and work, and still never “earn” their dues. Sometimes success meant determination… and sometimes, it was just luck.

Perhaps being too powerful, too unopposed, is a curse in and of itself, leading to boredom and dissipation, and the invention of imaginary enemies whose powers to torment were less limited than those of flesh and blood.

2024 was full of ups and downs, but still read 120 books. Check out all the stats from reading this year and see the best books I read in 2024.

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!

Parentified children are often referred to as “old souls” —wise and calm beyond their years. But they can pay for their precocity by harboring a squishy center of insecurity and loneliness, a wound formed in their earliest unsupported years.

Monsters and flowers aren’t much different. Sometimes they are hard to tell apart—but a good florist knows what to look for.

When we read, we take in whole eyefuls of words. We gulp them like water.

Sometimes, when things are broken, I find they fix themselves if you just pretend that they are fine and give them time.

Fantasy is a safe space; it is not necessarily what we wish was real. Crucially, in a fantasy we don’t need anyone’s permission other than our own: a fantasy is a deliberate, and usually entirely private, act of both memory and imagination.

There are countless things she would rather be doing. On a night like this, when the blue moon is full and bursting with light like summer fruit, she wants nothing more than to bathe in the moon water that now floods the riverbanks. She wants to sing poorly with no judgment, wearing nothing but the night sky.

You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered.