Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Sertraline. Fluoxetine. Escitalopram. The names read like a pharmaceutical poem, and in America, more people know these words than know their neighbor's first name. The most prescribed class of drugs...
Read article →Three hundred. That is how many times the average child laughs in a day. Three hundred bursts of pure, unreasonable, body-shaking joy at things like a dog sneezing or the word butt or the way spaghett...
Read article →I got ghosted on a Thursday. Not by a stranger from an app. By someone I had been talking to for three months. Three months of daily texts, voice notes while cooking dinner, a shared playlist that had...
Read article →There is a friend I used to talk to every day. His name is Marcus. We met in graduate school, spent three years finishing each other's sentences, studied for exams in his kitchen while his cat sat on...
Read article →I was twenty-two when I first died. Not literally, obviously. I'm writing this, so the biology held. But the person I was at twenty-two, the one who organized her entire personality around being the s...
Read article →Forty-six percent. That is the share of Americans who told researchers they regularly feel alone. If this were a disease with a physical symptom, if lonely people broke out in a visible rash, we would...
Read article →My sister teaches fourth grade in a Title I school outside of Memphis. Last August, before the school year started, I watched her spend an entire Saturday at Target with a cart full of composition not...
Read article →My marriage lasted six years. My closest friendship from college lasted about seven before it quietly dissolved into the kind of silence where neither person picks up the phone and eventually you stop...
Read article →I have spent twenty years studying personality development, and the single finding that still unsettles me is how early the architecture gets laid down. By age seven, the broad strokes of your tempera...
Read article →Let me walk you through some numbers that should make you angry. A single therapy session in the United States averages two hundred dollars. Insurance might cover part of that, if you have insurance,...
Read article →There are roughly 16 million vacant homes in the United States. There are roughly 650,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given night. If you do the math, and I encourage you to do the math be...
Read article →My grandmother used to fall asleep on the couch at eight thirty every night. Not because she was lazy or old or checked out. Because she woke up at four in the morning to open a flower shop in Torranc...
Read article →You need a license to cut hair. You need a license to catch a fish. In most states, you need a license to operate a hot dog cart. But you can create, shape, and psychologically influence a human being...
Read article →So I ran the numbers on my own life last week because I am the kind of person who does this instead of going to sleep at a reasonable hour, and the results were genuinely unsettling. Not in a dramatic...
Read article →Everyone says it the same way. I lost myself in that relationship. I hear it in support groups. I read it in comment sections. I have said it myself, sitting across from a therapist with mascara on my...
Read article →Your jaw. Check it right now. Is it clenched? If you grew up in a household where someone systematically rewrote your reality, where you were told that the thing that just happened didn't actually hap...
Read article →A mother once told me her son was difficult. She said it the way people describe weather. Matter-of-factly. A fixed condition of the universe. He has always been difficult. The boy was seven. He asked...
Read article →I dated a man for two years who told me I was too sensitive on our first date and I stayed anyway, because I had been told I was too sensitive by enough people that I assumed it was a fact about me ra...
Read article →Someone told me once that I was too much. Too intense, too emotional, too loud, too honest, too fast, too everything. And I carried that phrase around like a diagnosis for about five years. I made mys...
Read article →Nobody tells you about this part. They talk about the healing. They talk about the growth. They post the before and after. But nobody talks about the funeral you have to hold for the version of yourse...
Read article →Five words. Five words that have caused more psychological damage than any clinical diagnosis I have ever encountered in my practice. Five words that sound like love and function like a lock on a pris...
Read article →There is a kind of childhood that looks, from the outside, like everything went right. The house was clean. The grades were monitored. The lunches were packed. The doctor appointments happened on sche...
Read article →I said no to Thanksgiving at my sister's house last year, and from the silence on the phone you would have thought I had announced I was joining a cult. It was not even a dramatic no. I just said I ne...
Read article →Someone told me recently that I should try being more vulnerable. That I should open up. That healing meant peeling back the layers and finding the real me underneath. I almost laughed. The real me wa...
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