On the most familiar kind of content, and how easy it is to mistake it for the whole of who we are. You are driving, or walking, or standing in the shower, and you notice that an argument is underway. Someone said a thing. You are responding. They are countering. You have a better line ready this time. There is heat in it. The only odd detail is that none of this is happening. The other person is not here. The conversation has not occurred, and may never occur. And yet for a

On the words we don't have for what is happening inside us, and why having them matters. It's 3am. You wake up with a feeling. You are not sure what it is. Is it anxiousness? Are you scared? Is it just that your bedroom is too hot? The mind, always at the ready to provide an explanation, gets to work immediately. It offers narratives that fit the limited data it has. Maybe it was that conversation yesterday. Maybe it's the thing at work. Maybe it's something old, something de

On knowing the character you wear, and bringing all of yourself into coherence with it. We have explored the idea that the self you walk around in every day is more like a costume than a fixed truth. Something worn by a much larger mystery. That idea can land as liberating or a little unsettling, depending on where you catch it. But either way, it raises a question worth sitting with seriously: if it's a costume, are you wearing it well? Most of us have a character. We develo

On loneliness, the fear of being seen, and the courage to belong There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not announce itself. It does not arrive when you are alone in a room. It arrives at the dinner table, in the middle of a conversation, at the party where you are laughing at the right moments. It is the loneliness of being present in body while something essential in you remains carefully, strategically withheld. Most of us have learned to do this so well that w

Most of us move through the world fairly identified with who we think we are. But every so often, in a moment of unexpected stillness, something shifts. A reflection on personal identity, mystical experience, and what it means to wear our roles a little more loosely.