Inner Life

I have had the thought, more than once, that I would like my old life back. But when I try to locate the specific thing I want returned, the picture gets complicated. The apartment was the same apartment. The city was the same city. The people who mattered are mostly still here. What I was […]

For a long time, I believed that understanding myself better would make me feel less alone. Not in a naive way — I didn’t think self-knowledge was a substitute for actual connection. I thought it was a precondition for it. That if I could understand what I felt and why, I could finally say it

According to research from Dr. John Gottman, who spent decades studying couples in a laboratory at the University of Washington, both partners in a relationship are emotionally available to each other only about nine percent of the time. This leaves the other ninety-one percent of the relationship ripe, as Gottman put it, for miscommunication. The

Sometime in the first few weeks after the last child moves out, a lot of parents discover the grocery shopping has not adjusted. The cart fills with the same things it always did: the particular brand of something one child liked, the snack that was always in the cabinet, the portions that made sense for

There is a particular kind of suffering that doesn’t announce itself as a philosophical problem. It shows up as a tight chest at 2am. A loop of what-ifs that refuse to resolve. A restlessness that follows you into situations you’ve been assured should feel good. You go on the holiday and feel worse. You get

“If you don’t have self-awareness and are not able to manage your distressing emotions, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” — Daniel Goleman   There is a version of success that looks, from the outside, like pure ability. The person who thinks faster, knows more, performs

Think about a moment in your life when you felt genuinely, uncomplicated happy. Not relieved, not proud, not satisfied that something went as planned — but just present, and good, and fully there. Now try to remember whether, in that moment, you were thinking about how to be happy. Almost certainly, you weren’t. You were

“Dinner!” someone’s mother calls. Not into a phone, not through an app. Just out the back door, toward the general direction of the street, in a voice calibrated by practice to carry exactly far enough. Three blocks over, a different name. Two houses down, the specific two-syllable call that means right now, not in five