Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Nobody told me this was going to be the hard part. I thought the hard part was going to be the logistics — the medical appointments, the financial paperwork, the navigating of a healthcare system that...
Read article →There is a moment I return to often in clinical work, not because it was dramatic but because it was so quiet. A patient in her early sixties, a woman who had spent her career in public health and who...
Read article →When people talk about aging in place, the conversation almost always turns practical within seconds. Grab bars, ramps, meal delivery, medication management. These are important, but they are downstre...
Read article →The question of whether people become wiser as they age is one that the research literature has approached with considerably more rigor than the popular imagination would suggest. We have a cultural s...
Read article →One of the most persistent myths about moral development is that it ends somewhere around adolescence — that by the time you are a full adult, your ethical commitments are basically fixed and what rem...
Read article →The calls usually start the same way. A friend texts me to talk, which I know means something is wrong because she texts me to chat and calls me to talk. I pick up and she says: I think something is h...
Read article →I did not expect to cry during a mushroom trip. I am a journalist. I cover things. I maintain a certain observational distance that I have always thought of as professional but that, in retrospect, wa...
Read article →Faith deconstruction is one of the more disorienting experiences a person can go through, partly because from the outside it can look like nothing is happening. You still go to work. You still laugh a...
Read article →The question arrived like a slow tide rather than a sudden wave. I had worked for thirty-one years in the same field, been competent at it, been known for it, oriented my calendar and my conversations...
Read article →A woman came to see me after twenty years of conventional therapy and said: I have been well-processed and I still do not know how to live. She had excavated her childhood, understood her attachment p...
Read article →The question came to me during a particularly unremarkable Tuesday. I had left organized religion several years prior, navigated the slow erosion of certainties I had once taken for granted, and arriv...
Read article →I want to begin by naming something I notice in patients who are navigating midlife and beyond: they often come in apologizing for the topic. As if concern about aging is a vanity. As if the changes t...
Read article →Religious trauma recovery is something I did not have language for until I was well into adulthood. I had left the faith community I grew up in, but I carried its architecture inside me long after I s...
Read article →Patients sometimes ask me, with a mixture of curiosity and mild concern, whether mindfulness practice will change them. They have usually been referred for an MBSR program or similar intervention, and...
Read article →More people in the contemporary West describe themselves as spiritual but not religious than at any previous point in recorded survey data. The Pew Research Center has been tracking this demographic s...
Read article →Lagos had changed in ways I had not been warned about, and I had changed in ways I could not easily explain to people who had stayed. The street that contained my grandmother's house was wider than I...
Read article →Grief does not end. This is the first thing worth saying clearly, without softening it into manageability. The idea that mourning follows a trajectory toward closure — that with the right combination...
Read article →When the ground shifts beneath your sense of meaning, the first instinct is often to reach for something solid — a belief, a relationship, a project, a certainty about who you are and what the world i...
Read article →I became someone different on the plane. Not deliberately, not dramatically — but somewhere over the Atlantic, or the Pacific, depending on which crossing marked the real beginning, I stopped being le...
Read article →Culture is not something you leave at the door when you enter a marriage. It arrives with you — in the assumptions you carry about how conflict should be handled, what financial transparency between p...
Read article →I want to tell you about my grandmother's hands. She kneaded dough the same way every morning, a specific push-and-fold motion that I can still see clearly when I close my eyes, and the bread that cam...
Read article →My lola called me by a nickname in Tagalog that I cannot phonetically reproduce anymore. I know what it sounded like when I was seven. I know the warmth it carried, the particular affection encoded in...
Read article →Tattoos have a way of stopping conversations. Someone notices the ink curling around your wrist or climbing your neck and suddenly they want to know the story. That curiosity is not misplaced — the de...
Read article →Hair loss is treated by most of the world as a minor inconvenience, a cosmetic concern, perhaps a source of gentle humor. The person experiencing it is often told, directly or implicitly, that it does...
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