Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The Month Everything Shifts I started tracking my mental health against my cycle about four years ago, mostly because a therapist suggested it and I had run out of other explanations for why some week...
Read article →What I Tried First When I came back from my last deployment, I tried the things people suggest. I went to the VA. I sat in waiting rooms. I talked to a provider I saw for forty minutes every six weeks...
Read article →Why It Took Forty Years I have a PhD in cognitive science. I spent my career studying human behavior, decision-making, and the mechanisms of the mind. I did not go to therapy until I was forty-one yea...
Read article →The Thing I Thought I Knew Going In I had been in a long marriage. I knew how to be a wife in the specific way that my specific marriage had required, which is to say I knew how to organize a househol...
Read article →The Shape of It Before I Had Words The relationship did not look like abuse from inside it. That is the thing I most want people to understand, not as an excuse but as information that might be useful...
Read article →Before Cosplay I Did Not Know What Confidence Felt Like I was twenty-two when I put on my first costume for a convention. It was not elaborate — a wig, a specific color palette, a character I had love...
Read article →The Setup Nobody Tells You About I started using an AI to rehearse hard conversations about three years ago, mostly out of desperation. I had a performance review coming up with a manager who had a ta...
Read article →The Form That Did Not Have a Box for Me I am filling out a medical intake form at a new doctor's office. The form has two checkboxes: Male and Female. Below that, a line that says "preferred pronoun"...
Read article →How It Started, Which I Still Find Slightly Embarrassing I am not someone who would have predicted, at thirty-five, that I would make my closest friendships in a comment section. I have a graduate deg...
Read article →The Platform That Raised Me I did not grow up online in the way that gets talked about now, with the algorithmic feeds and the constant optimization for outrage. I grew up online in an earlier, messie...
Read article →What "No" Cost Me Before I Learned It For most of my life, I operated under a quiet but absolute rule: other people's comfort was more important than my own honesty. I called this flexibility. I calle...
Read article →The Feedback I Received Starting Young I was a child who felt things intensely and showed it. This was noted early. By elementary school I had received feedback, in various forms, that my emotional re...
Read article →The Part That Does Not Fit the Story When I finally got the job at the company I had been aiming toward for three years, my mother cried on the phone. "Everything we went through," she said, meaning t...
Read article →What Anxiety Looks Like in a Game My anxiety is the kind that does not always look like anxiety from the outside. I am functional. I hold a job and maintain friendships and can attend events without v...
Read article →The First Show I Watched After She Died My grandmother died in March. She had been declining for two years, and the death was not unexpected in any factual sense, and none of that made it smaller when...
Read article →As a Gamer Who Experiences Anxiety This Is How I Use It as Exposure Therapy I want to be careful not to oversell this, because "video games cured my anxiety" is not what I am describing. What I am des...
Read article →How We Met Is the Wrong Question When people ask how my partner and I got together, I usually give the short version because the long one requires too much explanation of what it felt like to be in a...
Read article →The First Time I Had to Start Over The diagnosis came on a Tuesday in October. I was twenty-three and sitting in a beige office that smelled like recycled air and hand sanitizer, and the psychiatrist...
Read article →As Someone Who Met Their Partner in a Video Game Here Is How It Actually Works We met in a guild. That is where I usually stop when someone asks how we met, because "we met in a guild" requires a foll...
Read article →What I Expected When We Started Watching My daughter was seven when she asked me to watch her favorite show with her. She had been borrowing episodes from a friend at school, the kind of under-the-rad...
Read article →What Everyone Gets Wrong at the Start When people find out I have OCD, there is a predictable sequence. First comes the qualifier—"oh, I'm so OCD about my desk too"—which I used to correct and now mos...
Read article →As an Immigrant the Grief Nobody Talks About When You Make It There is a version of the immigrant story that ends at arrival: you left, you struggled, you built something, you made it. The narrative h...
Read article →As Someone Who Uses Anime to Process Grief Here Is Why It Works I want to explain this without being precious about it, because the easy version of this essay is just "anime has emotional depth" and y...
Read article →As a People Pleaser in Recovery Here Is What Saying No Actually Feels Like I want to be honest with you about what saying no feels like, because the way people describe learning to set boundaries sugg...
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