There's a membrane between imagining God's love as a thought experiment and experiencing it as absolute reality, and if you slip across it, the entire known universe shatters and reassembles itself to be more whole and beautiful than you thought was possible. I had forgotten.

"It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self/ Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads / to a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through," wrote Mark Strand for his friend Joseph Brodsky…

Because thin places involve an encounter with the ineffable, they're hard to talk about. You know something has happened, some dissolution or expansion, but like most things that feel holy and a little dangerous, it just sounds weird in post-factum description. It helps to have someone with you there, someone else to feel what's happening so you

…it is also true that I know something I did not know before, which is that we are more expansive than we imagine. And this expansiveness is both powerful and frightening. It can ruin you to madness, or fate or God or disease or demons or whatever you call the unknowables. But it is gorgeous, too. It's how the better unknowables get in.

The goal is to help patients integrate their notions of who they were before their sicknesses with who they are now. The task is to go back and find a thread of a story that can be pulled across the hospitalization or the psychotic break or the shock therapy, from then to now, from "her" to "me." It matters what stories you tell yourself about

This is one danger that the current, hyperclinical story of illness seems designed to protect us from. If we are permeable the risks are infinite, and it's comforting to imagine firm borders guarding our soft places. As Biss points out, when it comes to the body, those borders are largely imagined. For the mind, whose boundaries are literally

In a sense, what keeps an OCD patient rooted in the world of the neurotic rather than the psychotic, what tethers her to a certain agreed-on reality, the adherence to which seems to be our measure of functional sanity, is her healthy sense of the boundaries of her own ego—her ability to toggle complex and contradictory conceptions of self and

…I was not surprised, even a little, to discover another person with OCD who'd been worrying his whole life about the distinctions and correspondences between himself and other people, and between himself and God. You don't have to have OCD or any mental illness to have concerns like this, but the urgency of locating the boundaries of the self, the

These injuries felt like surface-breaking tendrils of the actual problem, which had to do with a larger sense of indeterminacy. I was unreliable, changeful, and as I changed, the world seemed to change around me. I felt sure that there was some certainty just out of reach, or some inbound epiphany, but it never came.