how do you cope?

We are stuck in a doom-loop. You cannot open your phone or turn on the television without experiencing and absorbing untenable levels of grief.

To tolerate life , as Gaitskill implores us to do, you first have to actually live in it — get up in the morning, take out the trash, eat breakfast, go to work, get on the train, try not to look too deeply into the faces of the people sitting across from you, walk home, call your parents, pay your rent — and you must do all of this amid immeasurabl... See more

In the aftermath of the tragic, when silence or “being with” or an embrace may be the only appropriate responses, then only embodied presence will do. Its consolations are irreplaceable. 

In the face of terrifying chaos, a craving need to make sense of it all.

At their root, every single tragedy is either a reminder the ways that life is unbearable for so many or a news flash that for many somebodies out there, life just became increasingly more unbearable. Life was either already too impossible or it suddenly became more impossible. Some of us experience relatively few moments when the news of increased... See more

She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales b... See more

how shock is shared but nothing is done from it, how time can feel like a rubber band that in moments of tension is stretched out of place and snaps right back to its regular business-as-usual form.