He was let loose back into the world. He was trusted to go to work. It was asked of him to be normal. To be a father. To be a husband. But he couldn’t get better. He just couldn’t. He began to see all of time as happening simultaneously, or close to it. He began to see that he could be at work, or at Nathan’s baseball game, but he could also be

When we were young. And we made this franchise for people like us. And this is what there was. But, I guess, who did we become? Now that I have some money. Now that I have some skills. What is the thing I want to say to the world? What would I make for the people so that they might understand me? Understand who I am? Catharsis, drama, something

But the people who rise to success on their own never stop feeling the fear at the door, and the people lucky enough to be born into comfort and safety never become fully realized people in the first place. And who is to say which is better? No matter which way it is for you, it is a system that fucks you in the ass over and over, in perpetuity,

What is it about shame, that a teaspoon of it weighs so much more than a teaspoon of happiness or any other innocuous emotion? What is it about shame that it always feels like the truth?

In the first pew, Beamer and Jenny couldn’t move. They had watched all this, as the understanding of what had really gone wrong in their lives revealed itself to them, which was that the tide pool you’re born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons. Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see

“First they came for my yoga symbology,” Jenny said. “But I was fairly inflexible and so I said nothing.”

He remembered Ruth telling him about post-traumatic stress disorder, back when she still thought things could be different. He laughed at that: post-trauma! Anyone who named it that didn’t really understand it. There is no post. There’s only trauma. Over and over. Time moves on, but you stay there forever. No wonder there was no treatment. How do

There are few things more validating than to see someone who is like you and love them instead of hate them. That was a surprising thing about fatherhood that Nathan had not anticipated.

She’d shown impressive aptitudes in several areas and was considered gifted before that word meant privileged and merely bright.