Everything Is Fine

Eventually, I had no choice but to look at loss and pain, at all the pieces of my family's story that I didn't think I could ever understand. It was this process, recognizing the pieces, struggling to put them in order, that almost destroyed me. It's also what allowed me to live again.

In reality, memories are more feeling than fact. Though we want to think of our memories as one long record, the reel of our greatest hits, a memory is a constellation of infinitesimal changes, electrical signals, and hormones that elicit feelings... feeling drives memory, populates the moving pictures we see.

friends at a diner. Sometimes he’ll use this power as a party trick. He’ll ask someone to name a date—any date in the last fifteen years—and he’ll provide the day of the week. I’ve watched as people verify his answers with a Google search. I’ve never seen him give the wrong day.

was drunk I didn’t try to normalize, didn’t try to endure, to proceed like everything was fine.

Without consistent care, the wounds reopen, and tyrannical psychosis returns.

some past success may have led to this thought, a belief that therapy was something a person could be good at, was something that could be done the right way.