Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die

Rather than concluding that the metrics were flawed, I decided they weren’t enough.

think it could be an exciting opportunity for you to practice managing discomfort,

Now I’ve seen how one blurs into the other, how the reasons don’t matter when they all amount to a mass of shame.

Twenty years I’d spent wondering. How long can a person think about killing herself before she finally does it?

I have one good, productive day and it wears me down, perhaps because of the futility of it. Perhaps because I’m certain routine & organization is the key to steadiness & ease & then I do it & the result is a sort of emptiness. What am I missing? (Trust the process.)

Better put: my desire to die has always been directly related to my fear of failed ambition.

I am fundamentally more concerned with truth than fact.

Plath describes an adulthood spent hungry for different identities, but she’s stymied in an obsession with determining which next step would be best—as if there were a single right answer and as if she had only one chance to choose.

I was in constant negotiation with what I’d always assumed was laziness, a moral failing, and my remedy was an obsession with systems. I needed discipline, routines; those would be key if I wanted to deserve this dream job, if I didn’t want to squander the opportunity. I cycled through the most extreme versions of hope and disappointment, hinging e