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

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…

…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.

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"

If you sit with the oppressive feeling and breathe, you can start to reverse it, to work backward from frustration into a kind of expansiveness, the dissolving feeling of being one meaningful body in a sea of meaningful bodies. Does this sound insane? It is a little insane, maybe. Still, it has its strange rewards.

…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

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.