Sara

Trauma, then -- to those who demand compliance -- is a demon that gets inside you and makes you act really annoying. "You're only saying that because of your unhealed trauma. Come back when you've gotten healed, but don't bother us in the meantime." This model of "healing" is really just re-skinned exorcism. There's some thing inside you that takes

That is why physical courage is so important—it fills, as it were, the holes—and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.

But it gets harder. The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. We let our bodies go the way of our fears. A teen-aged boy, king of the

Queerness is located not just inside me but also interpersonally, in the dynamics I seek and feel seen by. I have stopped sleeping with my friends with as much frequency, but sexual desire is no longer feared or categorically denied in our relationships. I now live with my closest friends from childhood. We met at eleven, we were children together

Around that same time, an influential book on expert judgment was published that Kahneman told me impressed him “enormously.” It was a wide-ranging review of research that rocked psychology because it showed experience simply did not create skill in a wide range of real-world scenarios, from college administrators assessing student potential to

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the

So, if there is a lie at the heart of any system of inequality, then it is the job of people who want to destroy that system not to expose the lie, but to reveal how that lie poisons every benefit made possible by it.

Yancey Strickler’s Nine Creative Meditations

1. To me or to the mean - Focus on what makes your work strange or unique rather than trying to fit in with what everyone else is doing.

2. You are your audience - Create work that satisfies your own desires and interests rather than trying to please an imagined mass audience.

3. Small is more rewarding than big -