Even with the clocks, the subway seems to hover outside of time, a "heterotopia," or a space that exists beyond the reach of normal human systems and social mores. Foucault saw heterotopias everywhere: graveyards, hospitals, boats. In heterotopias, certain inviolable binaries "that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down"

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

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.

…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

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

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.

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

This tends to happen to ex-believers who find themselves back in church: it's not until you're back in the room, with the faith atomized in the air, the energy rising off the people still inside the system, that you really remember. Call it late-breaking phantom limb syndrome of the soul.

…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.