It is easy to write off childlike faith in the universe and childlike wonder at the world as simply a lack of knowledge about how life really is. Well, how is life, really? Do we know—we who have been...
If I had been a different sort of person, maybe less impressionable, less intense, less fearful, less utterly dependent upon the perceptions of others - maybe then I would not have bought the cultural...
I would disappear, only to come home reinvented. I would be unrecognizable upon my fleeting returns. This fantasy was realized, but not quite the way I had intended. In deciding to remake myself, I ma...
I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgment from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have...
E così passai attraverso lo specchio, passai nel mondo a rovescio, dove il su è giù e il cibo èingordigia, dove le pareti sono rivestite di specchi convessi, dove la morte è onorevole e la carne debol...
Back in Minneapolis, I said I would go to American. I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgment from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have...
Waiting through doubt teaches us enormous spiritual strength. It gives us the strength to go on—through struggle, through joy, through recovery, through our daily lives—even though we do not know how...
Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
My mother insulted me, I insulted her, Jeanne, the stepgrandmother, insulted everything in a skirt, and my grandfather just kept right on drinking. We picked at our food, competing for who could eat t...
My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.
I had a love affair with books, with characters and their words. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I c...
I developed a deep, abiding fear of jeans, which I still have. I hold my breath and shut my eyes when I pull on a pair in the dressing room, afraid they will now, as then, get stuck at my hips and the...
I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters.
Being here, living now, recognizing our smallness, is a spiritual practice. It allows us to be at peace with our humanity. It humbles us and grants us permission to fumble, and not know, and fail, and...
At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were - not particuarly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less - and spits out the monsters we are...
As winter went on, longer than long, we both freaked out. My mania grew to insane proportions. I sat in the study room at night, wildly typing out Dali-esque short stories. I sat at my desk in our roo...
For the purposes of my own spirituality, it is far more useful to recognize the limitations of my knowledge; to humble myself, not before a deity, but simply to be humble; to surrender, again, not to...
Whether one believes that transformation is effected by the will of an outer force, or the willingness of an inner self, does not change the reality of transformation as a phenomenon of spiritual expe...
We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What ma...
This is the weird aftermath, when it is not exactly over, and yet you have given it up. You go back and forth in your head, often, about giving it up. It’s hard to understand, when you are sitting the...