anxiety
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If It’s Not One Thing, It’s A Mother
My mother stood before me in her quilted bathrobe, dark hair held back in a ponytail, her eyes sunken, grey. I felt like the narrator of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who, startled out of sleep, opens his eyes to behold the…
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anhedonia and Hypertext
Depression is often marked by this type of absence—loss of pleasure, loss of energy, loss of meaning. It is frequently described as a type of nothingness, and while that nothingness is something, it can elude usual means of communication.
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Party of One
Social media is a cruel machine, propelled by our desire to keep up appearances and affirmed by a strange, voyeuristic capital of likes and favorites. While Facebook can at times feel like a digital cocktail party devoid of any significant…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Living Desert
“The simple truth of having lived in the desert for most of my life [is that] unprepared people don’t ‘go missing’ in the desert in the middle of summer. What happens is that they die.”
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Coping with Anxiety
Editor of The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, suffers from anxiety, and he’s hardly alone. In an essay called “Surviving Anxiety,” Stossel chronicles his lifetime battle with the nation’s most common mental illness, describing himself from the age of two on as…
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Cities and You
The Atlantic recently ran an article entitled “Why Americans Love Chain Stores: A Psychological Perspective,” and not only does it break down our metropolitan American tendencies, but it explains them in terms of our psychological issues. Our ideals about American…
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Poems for the Gmail Generation
Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present is an anxious, ambivalent ode to Internet culture.
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What You Think is Sad: Gabriele Basilico and San Francisco Noir
She always knew it would come to this. A screaming horde of bucknaked smutcrazed rapists banging on her glass ticket kiosk. She crossed herself and with a single prayer commended her soul to the Lord’s Everafter and consigned her flesh…