Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Nobody tells you about the grief. When you announce that you are downsizing — moving from the four-bedroom house to a two-bedroom condo, or from the two-bedroom apartment to the studio — people respon...
Read article →I was thirty-one when I walked into my first undergraduate lecture. The professor was younger than me by several years. The students filing in around me were wearing the easy confidence of people for...
Read article →There is a particular experience that comes with growing up between two cultures that people who've lived it often struggle to put into words for those who haven't. You know both worlds well enough to...
Read article →I have covered a lot of stories about relationships, and the first year of marriage is one I keep returning to — not because it is the most dramatic, but because it is the most quietly consequential....
Read article →The stepparent identity is one of the least-mapped territories in contemporary family life. There are clear cultural scripts for biological parents — imperfect, contested, but present. There are even...
Read article →There is a particular kind of surprise that comes when something you have anticipated for years finally arrives and turns out to be nothing like what you imagined. Becoming a grandparent is often that...
Read article →Nobody tells you that the hardest part of the first year after divorce might not be the grief. The grief you expected. The grief has a name, and it shows up on schedule, and everyone around you knows...
Read article →Adolescence is when most people first begin to feel the weight of the question that will follow them for the rest of their lives: Who am I, actually? Erik Erikson placed ego identity formation at the...
Read article →When adult children move back home, the floor plan stays the same but everything else shifts. The rooms are familiar, the coffee maker is where it always was, and yet something fundamental about the h...
Read article →I have spoken with dozens of people who took a career break — for a child, for a parent, for their own health, for a partner's relocation — and what strikes me most is how consistent their experience...
Read article →The version of yourself you present at work is probably somewhat different from the version you are with close friends, which is probably different again from who you are in your family of origin. Mos...
Read article →There is a reckoning that waits at the end of every life, and Erik Erikson had the nerve to put it at the center of his developmental framework. The final stage he described — Ego Integrity versus Des...
Read article →Identity doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in a family that spoke a particular language, kept particular customs, told particular stories about who its people were. For many people, the influence...
Read article →Some concepts resist translation not because they are vague but because they are precise in ways that another language lacks the structure to hold. Two-Spirit is one of those concepts. When Western me...
Read article →Erik Erikson gave us one of the most useful maps of human development ever put to paper, and one of the concepts on that map — role confusion — describes something that teenagers themselves often don'...
Read article →There is a question that waits for people somewhere in their forties or fifties, and it doesn't ask politely. It arrives in quiet moments and in the middle of the night, often without a clear precipit...
Read article →The most common thing I hear when people first encounter asexuality as a concept is some version of "but everyone feels attraction." They don't mean it cruelly. They're just reporting what their own e...
Read article →There is a concept in feminist theory that took me a long time to fully absorb, not because it's complicated but because it describes something so thoroughly embedded in the texture of everyday life t...
Read article →By the time most people are old enough to question what they were taught about gender, they've already been shaped by it for decades. The expectations were never delivered all at once in a form you co...
Read article →One of the most consistent findings in developmental psychology is also one of the most counterintuitive: not knowing who you are, under the right conditions, is not a sign that something has gone wro...
Read article →Most people who feel profoundly lost in adulthood don't think of themselves as having a psychological identity status. They think something is wrong with them specifically. They move through their day...
Read article →Non-binary identity is one of those concepts that seems to generate more heat than light in public conversation. People who've never considered that gender might operate differently than they assumed...
Read article →There is a kind of person who seems to have always known exactly who they are. Their values are settled, their direction is clear, their sense of self rarely wavers under pressure. From the outside, t...
Read article →There is a population of people whose lives are shaped by a simple biological fact that the medical and social systems around them have never quite figured out how to hold honestly. Intersex people —...
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