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Psychology
Almost Unendurable Beauty
The plastic prescription vial contains thirty doses. I press the cap down, twist it counterclockwise, and shake a cylindrical pill into my hand. It is an ugly gray, like dryer lint, like newly poured concrete, like a bullet. I know my daughter will notice this.
May 2015
The R-Word
When he diagnosed my three-month-old, Fiona, with a chromosomal disorder, the redheaded, cherubic medical geneticist did not use the phrase “mentally retarded” — thank God, or the gods of rhetoric, or just the politically correct medical school the young doctor had attended.
May 2015
The One You’re With
Barbara Fredrickson On Why We Should Rethink Love
I think it’s possible to learn to seek out love at any point in life. In my own life I made a major turnaround as an adult when I discovered how to relate more with people instead of remaining isolated. People can wake up at any time to what they need as human beings regardless of where they started. Positive emotions are our birthright, and we all have access to them. It could be that the families we grew up in didn’t help us to feel them, but the people who raised you can’t take away your capacity to resonate with others. They may have reduced your skills, but the capacity is still there.
July 2014
In The Quiet Room
There is nothing to remember. Pale flesh and coarse, dark hair and a mountain of a belly. Hands that lingered too long. A weight that wouldn’t move. No, nothing to remember.
May 2014
A More Perfect Union
Esther Perel on Intimacy, Infidelity, and Desire in Long Term Relationships
People come to me because their spouse isn’t making them happy. I don’t think any of our grandparents would have considered that a reason to seek therapy. A passionate relationship in which we ask for novelty and mystery from the same person we look to for security and stability — that is a grand new invention in the history of humankind.
December 2013
My Fifty-Minute Hour
Five minutes into the first therapy session of my life, and I’m already agitated that I won’t have time to tell this therapist what he needs to know about me — or, worse, that I will have time to tell him, and he still won’t get it. I explain again that I’m not looking for someone who’ll give me pep talks to build my self-esteem or offer behavior-modification exercises.
August 2013
Honoring Aggression
In your society, and to some extent in others, the natural communication of aggression has broken down. You confuse violence with aggression and do not understand aggression’s creative activity or its purpose as a method of communication to prevent violence.
August 2013
Sparky
I feel when he enters the building. I get out of my chair, stand in the doorway of my office in the English department. He comes around the corner. I put my hands on my hips, like a kid, and call down the hallway, “Hey, you!”
May 2013
I had been sad for so long that it shocked me,
the enormous yellow moon / balanced like a honeydew / on the hill’s knife-edge, / fat and implacable.
April 2013Sunbeams
August 2012Life is bitter and fatal, yet men cherish it and beget children to suffer the same fate.
