A sense of exhaustion so intense that I could barely stand;

the years trying to conceal my sensory distress and social dislocation in everyday life meant that I bounced in and out of burnout.

Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs. It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.

Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you.

On the other hand, there are some ways in which the bicameral mind makes more sense to me than the ill-fitting accounts I’ve been taught to believe about myself. I often receive emotions and insights that seem to arrive with no heredity in conscious thought, and I have to undergo a process of tracing them backwards to understand where they came

I relieve myself of the duty to search for language. I let myself feel instead.

As a child, I would look out of the window on a nighttime drive and think the moon was following us. From my vantage point, she seemed to be chasing us along the sky, breathlessly trying to keep up.

Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood.

I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”