Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Agents and publishers came calling, and the most prestigious magazines accepted her stories. After Iowa, Flannery moved to the East Coast, settling in a country house in Connecticut owned by her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, who rented out a room to her. There, without distractions, she began to work feverishly on her first novel. The future seemed so full of promise, and it was all going according to the plan she had laid out for herself after the death of her father. At Christmas of 1949 she returned to Milledgeville for a visit, and once there she fell quite ill, the doctors diagnosing her with a floating kidney. It would require surgery and some recovery time at home. All she wanted was to get back to Connecticut, to be with her friends, and to finish her novel, which was becoming increasingly ambitious. Finally, by March, she was able to return, but over the course of the next few months she experienced strange bouts of pain in her arms. She visited doctors in New York, who diagnosed her with rheumatoid arthritis. That December she was to return to Georgia once again for Christmas, and on the train ride home she fell desperately ill. When she got off the train and was met by her uncle, she could barely walk. She felt as if she had suddenly turned elderly and feeble. Racked with pain in her joints and suffering high fevers, she was admitted immediately to a hospital. She was told it was a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, and that it would take months to stabilize her; she would have to remain in Milledgeville for an indefinite period. She had little faith in doctors and was not so sure of their diagnosis, but she was far too weak to argue. The fevers made her feel as if she were dying. To treat her, the doctors gave her massive doses of cortisone, the new miracle drug, which greatly alleviated the pain and the inflammation in her joints. It also gave her bursts of intense energy that troubled her mind and made it race with all kinds of strange thoughts. As a side effect, it also made her hair fall out and bloated her face. And as part of her therapy, she had to have frequent blood transfusions. Her life had suddenly taken a dark turn. It seemed to her a rather strange coincidence that when the fevers were at their highest, she had the sensation that she was growing blind and paralyzed. Only months before, when she was not yet ill, she had decided to make the main character in her novel blind himself. Had she foreseen her own fate, or had the disease already been there, making her think such thoughts?

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Four weeks later, in the Edinburgh Marathon, Mike Lewis-Copeland fractured his fibula at mile sixteen. The pain was unlike anything he had ever experienced, but he kept limping along, dragging that leg, counting down those last ten miles, until he finished in 4:30. In the London Marathon in 2014, Graham Colborne did the exact same thing as Steven Quayle did five years later: eight miles in, stepped on a water bottle, broke a bone in his foot, and ran the remaining eighteen miles in absolute agony. A quick Google search turns up several other stories, just from the London Marathon. In 2012, Darren Oliver broke his leg a mile into the event, and ran twenty-five miles in severe pain to finish. In the 2021 marathon, Angie Hopson was in pain from the start. It became so excruciating that she had to stop after six miles, but only briefly. She ran the last twenty miles only to find out the next day that she had done it with a broken leg. Many of these injuries happened to dedicated distance runners. By continuing to run in pain, they weren’t just risking their health or the pain of a more serious injury. They were also jeopardizing their ability to train and run in future races, something they clearly loved and prioritized in their lives. Both Oliver and Hopson lamented how much time they would have to miss before running again. Lewis-Copeland, who had completed the London Marathon in 2019 before fracturing his fibula in Edinburgh, acknowledged that his recovery and rehabilitation was going to keep him from his plan to run in six more marathons that year. Why do these runners disregard their pain to the point where continuing to push through means that some body part breaks? And again, after the injury, why do they continue on, putting their future ability to run another race at risk? Because there’s a finish line . Finish lines are funny things. You either reach them or you don’t. You either succeed or you fail. There is no in between. Progress along the way matters very little. When we consider how off base our intuition is that we will walk away when circumstances make it clear that we ought to, these marathon runners help us to understand why we’ve got it so wrong. Once you start the race, success is only measured against crossing the finish line. And even a broken leg won’t make us quit when facing the choice between falling short or continuing on in pain. The Problem with Pass-FailThe benefits of setting goals are well known. Goals define your North Star and give you something to strive for. They motivate you to persist when things get tough. It’s been repeatedly demonstrated that goals that are both challenging and specific get you to work harder and are more effective than goals that are more amorphous and general.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  [music] [Female narrator] They were charismatic leaders who promised their adoring disciples they'd change the world. But all their dreams ended in despair. These cults of personality aren't distant memories. They're still among us today, led by a new type of prophet. When someone's authentic, you feel them. You have this--this feeling of a soul there. [Robert] In laymen's terms, it was a self-help group, An organization that promised human potential. You think, this has gotta be okay. Look, there are celebrities involved. There are very, very smart people involved. I want to be part of the cool group. [Paige] He has a way of making you feel like you're very important. He's friendly and engaging, and he cares about me, and I'm special. By the end of the five-day course, I was all in. It's not how far to push. It's how you push. [Narrator] But soon the group's focus shifts. It evolved into we're going to change the world, and he has the formula. He was particularly effective in brainwashing people. Actors, actresses, famous political figures, they're giving him millions and millions and millions. I think I'm probably the worst coach in the world, because I'm just a demon. [Rick] He could smell weakness, and he would drill down into that and crack them open. Even though I've been your student for years, and I get to spend all this time with you, I feel like there's always such a wealth that I can... [Dr. Marie] The women around him just loved him. He had something magical about him. Turns out he likes to sleep with his followers. Like, a lot. Like, so much. [Kelly] He was trying to create an army of women to do his bidding. [woman screaming] When you start to enjoy the amount of pain that you're inflicting on others, then you're no longer a victim. You're a perpetrator. [woman screaming] [Robert] Keith Raniere was branding them like cattle with the initials "KR." He just kept going and going, pushing and pushing. He had to have more. [cheers and applause] [Dr. Marie] This could happen to you. Never think that you are above being deceived or manipulated. [Narrator] This is the true story of NXIVM, the modern-day sex cult. [music] [music] [Narrator] At first glance, this nondescript house, tucked away in the suburbs of Albany, New York, looks like any other home on the block. But for the select women invited inside, it's actually the epicenter of a cult... one whose leader, self-help guru Keith Raniere, is having his most devoted followers partake in a secret ritual marking them as members for life. The women were told it was like a little tattoo. But Keith Raniere... was branding them like cattle. [woman screaming] A two-inch, red-hot brand would be pressed into your body 50 to 100 times over the course of half an hour. [woman screaming] There's no anesthesia. And there's a slow burning in the skin. Excruciating pain.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  If you, uh, take a few tests and answer a few questions and sign some papers, um, you can become a coach. And then after that, uh, you start earning stripes. People can come. They can take classes as much as they want forever and ever and ever. They can satiate in our curriculum. But what Vanguard has wanted us to do for a very long time is have people working the stripe method. [Narrator] Stripes that are added to the sashes, all students, coaches, and instructors are required to earn. As you went up the ladder, so to speak, you got a different sash with a different color that showed that you achieved certain levels. It's very much just cribbing completely from the belts of different martial arts programs. You start off as a student. Students have a white sash. And you started to earn stripes after a while. And then you can become a coach. Coaches get a yellow sash. And then eventually, you earn enough stripes to become a proctor. Our new one-stripe full proctors. [Narrator] While it sounds easy, advancement is actually quite difficult. You kind of have to buy your way through the ranks up to the top. It's very similar to when you talk to people in Scientology who have had to buy their way up the Bridge. It's a similar structure, just not as many steps. [Kelly] However, the rules were constantly changing. You're constantly being critiqued and constantly being told you're not good enough to move up. You are in the way of yourself, and you're not growing enough. They would say, you need to take the curriculum again. You're--you're missing this part. It's kind of like a hamster in the wheel, where you're never gonna get the cheese. [Dr. Joseph] It really is a psychological manipulation because you can devote your entire life, your resources, your time, your family, and you'll never get what you came for. [Robin] They were being pressured to move up with the sashes, with the levels. And they had to keep feeding money into it to take more workshops. And these workshops were 8,000, 10,000. You wanna change your life? That's not gonna come cheap. [Narrator] Both members and coaches are encouraged to bring others into the fold. [Kelly] It was a constant conversation about getting people in. And we didn't use the word "recruit." We used the word "enroll." Never use the word "recruit," we were told. [Narrator] And while recruiters are promised a commission for new members, the money never seems to materialize. I had enrolled nine people, you know? But I didn't get any money from that at all, because the only way you could get money from it is if you had enrolled the right amount of people within the first... 30 to 45 days. So only a small amount of people would get paid. [Kelly] Everybody at the top needed to get paid. Nobody at the bottom was getting paid.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  He says, looking straight ahead through the glistening windshield, simply and sadly, “I can’t.” An update on the Artful Dodger. Turns out he’s our age and has a day job, besides playing the drums. “Well, you’ve gotta love a guy in a band,” I say encouragingly. “I agree,” she says. “I just wish he played the guitar.” A woman walks by the phone booth in a nightgown, carrying a coffee cup and a cigarette. It’s early afternoon. I knock on the glass and wave hello. There are any number of eccentrics around here. She’s a painter. Here’s a good one: After the divorce I was on my way somewhere early one morning and saw Eric’s brand-new girlfriend walking from his house to her own, wearing nothing but a pale lavender nightgown and a pair of Birkenstock sandals. Her hair was stuffed into a rubber band and hung down her back like a horse’s tail, she was holding a sheaf of papers and a long leash, at the end of which was her dog, a big black biter. The nightgown was one of those Indian- style jobs, with embroidery along the bodice. It’s the sort of thing you could convince yourself didn’t look totally like a nightgown if you only had three blocks to walk and it was too early for anyone to be out driving around. Except I was. Out driving around. I spent the rest of the morning draped over someone’s couch, sobbing and eating cinnamon toast. I tell Elizabeth about this. Yeah, yeah, she remembers. Well, never again, I vow. Thank God that’s in my past. Who needs it. Blah blah blah. The boys of my youth give me the malaise. “Oh brother,” she says. Don’t oh brother me. And I gotta go, I’m late for my nap. The truth is, I’m weary of all that men stuff. It’s either so boring that I’d rather hang around with my girlfriends or it’s like gunfire to the chest. I actually like it inside the bell jar — I don’t have to breathe anyone’s air but my own and I still get a view of the landscape. There’s a woman here at the colony, Stasia, a filmmaker who went to a workshop to learn how to walk over a bed of hot coals. She tells me about it postnap, as we’re waiting for the dinner bell, having drinks on the terrace. The thing is, why would anyone want to walk over a bed of hot coals? “I saw a flyer for it on a lamppost,” she explains. They spent an afternoon in the presence of a short charismatic man, talking about their feelings and consulting various higher powers. At about four-thirty they took their shoes off and performed the miracle. So, what did it feel like? “It felt like hot coals,” she says. I knew it would. The door to the terrace swings open and out walks our friend Frank. Right behind him is a new guy.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  (This is, you will recognize later, a pattern: she loves to walk away from you in places where you know no one, where you have no power, where you can’t simply get up and go somewhere. Over the course of your relationship she will walk away from you in New York a total of seven times.) You sit down on a bench and numbly try to buy a bus ticket on your phone, but your phone’s storage is full and your screen does not respond properly to your finger. When you look up she is actually gone, and you panic, because you don’t know New York, and not only do you not know New York, you hate New York, and you have too many bags and no money for a taxi and you don’t even know the difference between uptown and downtown. In every direction walk New Yorkers: so confident, so cosmopolitan. You think, they are not the kind of people who get abandoned by their girlfriends at twee craft fairs. You cry so hard that a tall woman with dreadlocks gets up from her storage container and comes over to you. She sits on the bench and puts her arm around your shoulder, and asks if she can do anything to help. You hiccup and wipe your nose with your hand, and tell her no, no, you’re just having a bad day, and she crosses back to her container to fetch something. When she returns, she hands you a tiny box of cone incense and a carved wooden incense holder. “For your new year,” she says, and you want to believe she’s right—that even though your suffering feels eternal, unrelenting, the new year is full of promise, and it is coming fast. Dream House as Mystical PregnancyEvery television show you watched in your twenties included some kind of mystical pregnancy. Every interesting female character needs one, or so the showrunners seem to think. Vampires get pregnant with magical mortals; comatose women give birth to gods and empathic starfleet officers to mystic energy; time-traveling companions discover they’ve been flesh avatars for months, and their actual body is somewhere far away and about to give birth. One woman wakes up on her wedding day to discover herself massively pregnant, courtesy of an alien.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  For someone who was wavering in their beliefs in December, before the aliens failed to show, this escalating commitment, to the point of spending all night waiting in a garage for a spaceship, is bizarre. Being in a cult becomes an integral part of your identity. You are a Seeker. You believe in the prophecy. Membership becomes who you are, particularly because the beliefs you are committing to are so extreme, as are the actions you take based on those beliefs. Cutting off your family and friends. Giving up all your possessions. Exposing yourself to ridicule from the outside world. We want our identity to be consistent over time. Because our beliefs form the fabric of that identity, we are also motivated to keep our beliefs intact. If the cult is your identity, then how can you maintain consistency if you discover information that conflicts with the beliefs that caused you to join the cult in the first place? Now, you might scoff at the behavior of the Seekers and say, “These people have nothing to do with me because, obviously, they’re nutty. They joined a cult. Why would you expect them to be rational?” But what you need to understand is that we’re all in a cult of our own identity. Why did Sears choose to sell off its profitable assets to save the retail part of its business, which had been faltering for over a decade and a half? Sears was trapped in its identity as a retail company. That’s how it defined itself and that’s how the world saw the company as well. If Sears had sold off its retail business, that’s the moment it would have ceased to be Sears, at least the Sears that the public knew it as. There’s no doubt that Sasha Cohen’s identity was “Sasha Cohen, the figure skater.” By the time she was twenty-five, she had devoted eighteen years of her life to skating, persisted through terrible injuries, and was world-famous. That was how she thought of herself and that was how the public viewed her. This is part of what explains why she was willing to suffer, miserable with the grind of performing on the endless circuit of ice shows and exhibitions. Quitting would have meant, in some sense, abandoning who she was. You don’t need to be world famous for these issues of identity to have a deep effect on your ability to cut your losses. This is true for everybody. When you say, “I’m a teacher,” or “I’m a coder,” or “I’m a doctor,” or “I’m a gamer,” you’re making a statement about who you are. Adults ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We don’t ask, “What job do you want?” We are asking who they will be, not what they will do. This is a difference with quite a large distinction. And children get that.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  santa lear Each night, like another night in a long-running play, I wander the empty streets, check on every sprawled man until I find him, tension built into each blanket. Each man has a role—one will be the lunatic king, one will be the fool. One will offer dire warnings, one will plot against us, one will try to help. I am forced to play the son. Most nights our paths cross before dawn, but sometimes months will pass without contact. The stage is done up like the outdoor space of an anonymous American city—broken neon, billboards of happy products, vast, empty. The light is dim, but we can make out figures draped in blankets, on benches, in doorways, beneath bushes. Each night I wander among them, and some I speak with, and for some I leave food. Another blanket. A coat. Any one of them may or may not be my father. Though the audience expects the encounter, they’ve paid for the encounter, I may not find him. Weeks may pass without a climax. Maybe housed, maybe dead, maybe he has left the city, though that is unlikely. The action flags, the audience lulled by the dull repetition, the same faces, then a new face ( tonight the role of Suzy will be played by Lili Taylor ), which soon becomes once again the same face. The night my father does rise from beneath a blanket, what am I supposed to say? Hard by here is a hovel ? or Gracious, my lord, you cannot see your way? Out since early February, now it’s nearly December, count the months off on your fingers. One freezing night in the past year my father’s left foot got frostbitten. In a letter to me he writes, I am losing my left toes (due to not taking off my shoes at night) . Piece by piece he’s leaving this world ( Accursed fornicator! How are your stumps? ), with no bomb coming to take him whole. I put this letter in the cardboard box with all the rest. Some months he sells blood to pay the rent on his storage unit ( miss one payment at the Happy Hound, your stuff’s in the dumpster ). When he tells me this I give him some money, whatever I have on me. Bench boy, box man, rat food, I want him to be a projection from the machine hidden inside my head, I want him to fall from the fifth-story window, I want to unplug the machine. Some nights I imagine running him over with the Van— your father’s dead , the phone will say, we’re holding him in the morgue . I’ve been there, seen the tiny freezer doors stacked to the ceiling, the gurneys draped with sheets, the toes tagged, just like the movies. Where will they hang the tag on my father? Months later I find him, limping. The doctor wanted to amputate , he says, but I walked .

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  99 00:04:29,602 --> 00:04:32,372 They have your money. They have your images. 100 00:04:32,472 --> 00:04:34,641 If you don't agree with it, 101 00:04:34,741 --> 00:04:37,510 all of that's gonna get out. 102 00:04:37,610 --> 00:04:41,547 [Dr. Joseph] It's not enough to have followers worship you. 103 00:04:41,648 --> 00:04:44,250 It's not enough to get them to sleep with you. 104 00:04:44,350 --> 00:04:46,185 It's not enough to get their money, 105 00:04:46,286 --> 00:04:47,654 to get them to do the things that you want. 106 00:04:47,754 --> 00:04:50,256 Now you have to take their flesh. 107 00:04:50,356 --> 00:04:51,291 [sizzling] [woman groans] 108 00:04:51,391 --> 00:04:52,859 [Narrator] Raniere has no idea 109 00:04:52,959 --> 00:04:55,862 the brandings will ultimately lead to his downfall, 110 00:04:55,962 --> 00:04:59,532 despite his one-time promise of changing the world. 111 00:05:02,035 --> 00:05:04,837 Born in Brooklyn in 1960, 112 00:05:04,937 --> 00:05:07,373 Raniere demonstrates a remarkable intelligence 113 00:05:07,473 --> 00:05:09,742 at a very young age. 114 00:05:09,842 --> 00:05:11,678 He says when he was, like, two years old, 115 00:05:11,778 --> 00:05:14,647 he was talking in full sentences. 116 00:05:14,747 --> 00:05:16,349 [Armando] He could speak three languages 117 00:05:16,449 --> 00:05:18,551 before he could even read and write. 118 00:05:18,651 --> 00:05:20,953 He was tested early on and... 119 00:05:21,054 --> 00:05:26,159 was able to have one of the highest IQ's ever recorded. 120 00:05:26,259 --> 00:05:30,229 [Narrator] All that talent quickly goes to Raniere's head. 121 00:05:30,330 --> 00:05:33,700 Someone having talent and a high IQ, 122 00:05:33,800 --> 00:05:37,070 plus being brought up in a environment 123 00:05:37,170 --> 00:05:39,672 where they're praised for being exceptional, 124 00:05:39,772 --> 00:05:42,475 that's a really good recipe for 125 00:05:42,575 --> 00:05:46,412 these toxic, narcissistic, antisocial leaders 126 00:05:46,512 --> 00:05:48,748 who manipulate and use others. 127 00:05:48,848 --> 00:05:50,183 [Paige] His father, looking back, 128 00:05:50,283 --> 00:05:53,052 had said that after they told Keith he was gifted, 129 00:05:53,152 --> 00:05:54,854 he fully believed it. 130 00:05:54,954 --> 00:05:56,422 He fully bought his own bullshit. 131 00:05:56,522 --> 00:05:58,991 He was Christ incarnate. 132 00:05:59,092 --> 00:06:00,159 He was God. 133 00:06:00,259 --> 00:06:03,930 No one could tell him otherwise. 134 00:06:04,030 --> 00:06:05,732 [Narrator] Some say there's also a darkness 135 00:06:05,832 --> 00:06:09,502 to the alleged boy genius. 136 00:06:09,602 --> 00:06:12,438 Even as an elementary school child, 137 00:06:12,538 --> 00:06:14,607 he had an evil streak. 138 00:06:14,707 --> 00:06:18,277 Students that he attended class with feared him. 139 00:06:18,378 --> 00:06:23,149 They saw that he was a kind of evil seed. 140 00:06:23,249 --> 00:06:25,318 [Narrator] But when it comes to the opposite sex, 141 00:06:25,418 --> 00:06:28,488 Raniere is all charm. 142 00:06:28,588 --> 00:06:30,356 According to his parents, 143 00:06:30,456 --> 00:06:32,658 he constantly had girls around him, 144 00:06:32,759 --> 00:06:35,094 and he would kind of isolate them, 145 00:06:35,194 --> 00:06:38,965 and then tell them each that they were the one.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Bluebeard Bluebeard’s greatest lie was that there was only one rule: the newest wife could do anything she wanted—anything—as long as she didn’t do that (single, arbitrary) thing; didn’t stick that tiny, inconsequential key into that tiny, inconsequential lock. 14 But we all know that was just the beginning, a test. She failed (and lived to tell the tale, as I have), but even if she’d passed, even if she’d listened, there would have been some other request, a little larger, a little stranger, and if she’d kept going—kept allowing herself to be trained, like a corset fanatic pinching her waist smaller and smaller—there’d have been a scene where Bluebeard danced around with the rotting corpses of his past wives clasped in his arms, and the newest wife would have sat there mutely, suppressing growing horror, swallowing the egg of vomit that bobbed behind her breastbone. And then later, another scene, in which he did unspeakable things to the bodies (women, they’d once been women) and she just stared dead into the middle distance, seeking some mute purgatory where she could live forever. (Some scholars believe that Bluebeard’s blue beard is a symbol of his supernatural nature; easier to accept than being brought to heel by a simple man. But isn’t that the joke? He can be simple, and he doesn’t have to be a man.) Because she hadn’t blinked at the key and its conditions, hadn’t paused when he told her her footfalls were too heavy for his liking, hadn’t protested when he fucked her while she wept, hadn’t declined when he suggested she stop speaking, hadn’t said a word when he left bruises on her arms, hadn’t scolded him for speaking to her like she was a dog or a child, hadn’t run screaming down the path from the castle into the nearest village pleading with someone to help help help—it made logical sense that she sat there and watched him spinning around the body of wife Number Four, its decaying head flopping backward on a hinge of flesh. This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability. You are being tested and you are passing the test; sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are; look how loyal, look how loved. 14. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C610 and C611, The one forbidden place (forbidden chamber).

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  A man selling rice cakes spotted her, her soiled nightgown torn at the collar, and offered a scoop of sweet rice steaming on a banana leaf. She dropped down in the dirt and chewed, eyes fixed on the ground between her coal-shaded feet. “Where are you from,” the man asked, “a young girl like you wandering at this hour? What is your name?” Her mouth filled itself with that lush sound, the tone forming through the chewed rice before the vowel rose, its protracted ah, pronounced Laang. Lily, she decided, for no reason. “Lan,” she said, the rice falling, like chipped light, from her lips. “Tên tôi là Lan.” Surrounding the boy soldier, the woman, and the girl is the land’s verdant insistence. But which land? Which border that was crossed and erased, divided and rearranged? Twenty-eight now, she has given birth to a girl she wraps in a piece of sky stolen from a clear day. Sometimes, at night, the girl asleep, Lan stares into the dark, thinking of another world, one where a woman holds her daughter by the side of a road, a thumbnail moon hung in the clear air. A world where there are no soldiers or Hueys and the woman is only going for a walk in the warm spring evening, where she speaks real soft to her daughter, telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart. — Due to their ubiquity and punitive size, macaques are the most hunted primates in Southeast Asia. The white-haired man raises a glass and makes a toast, grins. Five other glasses are lifted to meet his, the light falls in each shot because the law says so. The shots are held by arms that belong to men who will soon cut open the macaque’s skull with a scalpel, open it like a lid on a jar. The men will take turns consuming the brain, dipped in alcohol or swallowed with cloves of garlic from a porcelain plate, all while the monkey kicks beneath them. The fishing rod cast and cast but never hitting water. The men believe the meal will rid them of impotence, that the more the monkey rages, the stronger the cure. They are doing this for the future of their genes—for the sake of sons and daughters. They wipe their mouths with napkins printed with sunflowers that soon grow brown, then start to tear—soaked. After, at night, the men will come home renewed, their stomachs full, and press themselves against their wives and lovers. The scent of floral makeup—cheek to cheek.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  We started with a few obscure English words in the thirty-fourth chapter of the fifth book of the Bible about a man named Moses. But then we dipped just a bit below the surface, and in no time we found a subtle, slightly crude, quite funny, sly, unexpected sexual euphemism that took us earlier in the story that then circled back to another story a bit later, and in no time we were dealing with violence and hope and despair and slavery and oppression and empires and imagination and human consciousness and the birth of new ideas no one had ever had before, and you were reading along thinking about them back then but when we talked about whether or not things can change or are they set in stone and there’s nothing you can do about it, you realized you’ve had that question before about your own life, right? So it started with an affirmation of Moses’s organ potency, but a page or two later, we were talking about the despair we all flirt with from time to time, weren’t we? We started with a line about his life, which led us to a line about their life, which led us to your life and my life, which led us from the past to the present to the future to all of life. All that, from reading one line in . . . the Bible. ____________________ Why bother with such a strange, old book? Because it’s a book about them, then, that somehow speaks to you and me, here and now, and it can change the way you think and feel about everything. But isn’t it actually a library of books written across a number of years by people who didn’t know each other with agendas and opinions and limited perspectives? Yes, of course it is. And it’s even stranger than that, which we’ll get into. But doesn’t it promote violence and all sorts of primitive and barbaric behavior that we’ve left behind? No, and I want you to see where that view comes from and why it’s so misguided. But you have to admit that there is a lot of violence in the Bible—like the violence you skipped over just now in that retelling of the Exodus story—and a lot of it is done in the name of God or because the person believed God told them to do it. Absolutely. There are a lot of those stories in the Bible, and we’re going to explore a number of them, because there’s more going on there than most people realize. But it seems like a lot of the people who talk the most about how important and central and necessary the Bible is seem to skip over and gloss and censor the most dangerous and interesting parts about sex and politics and power and the poor.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me. Go to this page . Breakfast. You scramble some eggs, make some toast. She eats mechanically and leaves the plate on the table. “Clean that up,” she says as she goes to the bedroom to get dressed. If you do as you are told, go to this page . If you tell her to do it herself, go to this page . If you stare mutely at the dirty plate, and all you can think about is Clara Barton, the feminist icon of your youth who had to teach herself how to be a nurse and endured abuse from men telling her what to do at every turn, and you remember being so angry and running to your parents and asking them if women still got told what was right or proper, and your mom said “Yes” and your dad said “No,” and you, for the first time, had an inkling of how complicated and terrible the world was, go to this page . As you’re washing the dishes, you think to yourself: Maybe I could tie my arm down somehow? Maybe put a tack on my forehead? Maybe I should be a better person? Go to this page . You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. Did you think that by flipping through this chapter linearly you’d find some kind of relief? Don’t you get it? All of this shit already happened, and you can’t make it not happen, no matter what you do. Do you want a picture of a fawn? Will that help? Okay. Here’s a fawn. She is small and dappled and loose-legged. She hears a sound, freezes, and then bolts. She knows what to do. She knows there’s somewhere safer she can be. Go to this page .

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  However, by the 1960s, the pendulum had begun to swing in the opposite direction. Emotions were finding their way back into the therapeutic community. Two of Reich’s patients (who later became his students) were Alexander Lowen and Fritz Perls. The first he referred to as the “uppity uptown tailor,” while the other he contrasted as “the dirty old man from the Bowery.” 141 Both developed parallel extensions of Reich’s work, incorporating various aspects of his ideas and methods. While Lowen continued to emphasize emotional expression, and added the function of the legs in “grounding” emotions, Perls held to a more complex view of the organism. His therapeutic approach incorporated many ideas taken from the gestalt psychologies of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, including those of Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Goldstein. However, in the anarchy of the 1960s, with its revolutionary disregard for rationality and the status quo, emotional catharsis was resurrected as a sure path to “liberation” and “freedom.” However, this process of emotional abreaction can become a self-perpetuating mechanism by which patients crave further “emotional release.” Unfortunately, this process moves into an ever-tightening spiral that frequently culminates in a therapeutic dead end. Such was the case, for example, in the 1970s, when Arthur Janov promoted his primal therapy. (Reich had warned his contemporaries about mindlessly using emotional catharsis, pejoratively calling its promoters “freedom peddlers.”) “Neo-Reichian release,” “encounter groups,” “primal therapy,” “rebirthing” and other dramatic therapies co-opted the staid preeminence of the “talking cure” with an exuberant expressive zeal. Presently, at the beginning of the third millennium, we are seeing an emerging synthesis, a movement toward a more balanced emphasis on emotion and reason. In particular, experiential therapies are emerging, such as those described by Diana Fosha and others. 142 These include dialectical behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The ability to effectively contain and process extreme emotional states is one of the linchpins both of effective, truly dynamical trauma therapy and of living a vital, robust life. While love can sway us off our feet, powerful emotions like rage, fear and sorrow can pull our legs out from under us. We can be driven nearly insane by rage, paralyzed by fear and drowned by sorrow. Once triggered, such violent emotions can take over our existence. Rather than feeling our emotions, we become them; we are swallowed up by these emotions. This can be quite a dilemma because being informed by our emotions, not domineered by them, is crucial in directing our lives. We may have too much or too little; they may come upon us like a torrential flood or leave us dry like a parched desert. They may lead us in a positive direction or cause us untold suffering. They may prompt creative exultation or may provoke disastrous actions and poor decisions.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Anytime you can make a decision about cutting your losses in advance, you’ll do better at closing those mental accounts. Chapter 6 Summary Monkeys and pedestals is a mental model that helps you quit sooner. Pedestals are the part of the problem you know you can already solve, like designing the perfect business card or logo. The hardest thing is training the monkey. When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress. Building pedestals creates the illusion that you are making progress toward your goal, but doing the easy stuff is a waste of time if the hard stuff is actually impossible. Tackling the monkey first gets you to no faster, limiting the time, effort, and money you sink into a project, making it easier to walk away. When we butt up against a hard problem we can’t solve, we have a tendency to turn to pedestal-building rather than choosing to quit. Advance planning and precommitment contracts increase the chances you will quit sooner. When you enter into a course of action, create a set of kill criteria. This is a list of signals you might see in the future that would tell you it’s time to quit. Kill criteria will help inoculate you against bad decision-making when you’re “in it” by limiting the number of decisions you’ll have to make once you’re already in the gains or in the losses. In organizations, kill criteria allow people a different way to get rewarded beyond dogged and blind pursuit of a project until the bitter end. A common, simple way to develop kill criteria is with “states and dates:” “If by (date), I have/haven’t (reached a particular state), I’ll quit.” INTERLUDE IIGold or NothingWhen seven-year-old Alexandra “Sasha” Cohen first became interested in figure skating in 1992, American women had medaled in every Winter Olympics going back to 1968. By the time she started competing in high-level junior competitions, women’s figure skating was the most watched Winter Olympic event. American skaters like Kristi Yamaguchi, Nancy Kerrigan, Tara Lipinski, and Michelle Kwan were household names. A huge U.S. audience watched qualifying events and non-Olympic championships, looking for the next superstar. Four years younger than Kwan and two years younger than Lipinski (who retired after the 2002 Olympics), Cohen was one of thousands of athletic young girls in highly competitive, demanding local programs, laser-focused on filling that role. Sasha Cohen went on to become one of the best figure skaters of her time. From the late nineties through her silver-medal performance at the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin, Italy (at age twenty-one), she was a top performer in elite junior, national, and international competitions. Cohen rose to prominence at just fifteen, finishing second at the 2000 U.S. Figure Skating Championships to Michelle Kwan who, by that time, had already won two World Championships and an Olympic silver medal.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  A man selling rice cakes spotted her, her soiled nightgown torn at the collar, and offered a scoop of sweet rice steaming on a banana leaf. She dropped down in the dirt and chewed, eyes fixed on the ground between her coal-shaded feet. “Where are you from,” the man asked, “a young girl like you wandering at this hour? What is your name?” Her mouth filled itself with that lush sound, the tone forming through the chewed rice before the vowel rose, its protracted ah, pronounced Laang. Lily, she decided, for no reason. “Lan,” she said, the rice falling, like chipped light, from her lips. “Tên tôi là Lan.” Surrounding the boy soldier, the woman, and the girl is the land’s verdant insistence. But which land? Which border that was crossed and erased, divided and rearranged? Twenty-eight now, she has given birth to a girl she wraps in a piece of sky stolen from a clear day. Sometimes, at night, the girl asleep, Lan stares into the dark, thinking of another world, one where a woman holds her daughter by the side of a road, a thumbnail moon hung in the clear air. A world where there are no soldiers or Hueys and the woman is only going for a walk in the warm spring evening, where she speaks real soft to her daughter, telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart. — Due to their ubiquity and punitive size, macaques are the most hunted primates in Southeast Asia. The white-haired man raises a glass and makes a toast, grins. Five other glasses are lifted to meet his, the light falls in each shot because the law says so. The shots are held by arms that belong to men who will soon cut open the macaque’s skull with a scalpel, open it like a lid on a jar. The men will take turns consuming the brain, dipped in alcohol or swallowed with cloves of garlic from a porcelain plate, all while the monkey kicks beneath them. The fishing rod cast and cast but never hitting water. The men believe the meal will rid them of impotence, that the more the monkey rages, the stronger the cure. They are doing this for the future of their genes—for the sake of sons and daughters. They wipe their mouths with napkins printed with sunflowers that soon grow brown, then start to tear—soaked. After, at night, the men will come home renewed, their stomachs full, and press themselves against their wives and lovers. The scent of floral makeup—cheek to cheek.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  “I just crashed my whole computer,” she explains. “I just crashed my whole life,” I tell her mournfully. I’m afraid she’s going to try to hang up. “Who even cares about the boys of my youth? There weren’t any, it was all imaginary. I’m making it up as I go along.” I draw a picture of a pit bull on the phone book in the phone booth. It has pointy ears, bowed legs, and giant teeth. “Now I’m drawing a giant-toothed dog,” I tell her. “That’s good,” she says. “Remember that time you went to Florida to write and became troubled?” “In the category of freak-out, that was the real thing.” I draw a palm tree with coconuts hanging off it next to the pit bull. “I made you eat a banana that time,” she reminds me. We muse on that for a moment, until her computer comes back on line and says hello to her in a voice from outer space. We hang up. As a matter of fact, there happens to be a banana in my lunch. Every day they give me a lunchbox with a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a cookie in it. I eat the cookie, think about the sandwich, and put the fruit on my writing table, then I go back to staring out the window of my studio. This is how professional writers work. I went to Florida once to work on a writing project. I borrowed a house on Key-something, with a million-mile view of the Atlantic, sliding glass doors, expensive furniture, and cockroaches the size of a man’s big toe. My friend’s sister, who was lending me the house, showed me how you had to spray Raid directly on the bug in order to make it die. At first it seemed unfazed, and then it wandered about a foot away and fell over. “They aren’t cockroaches,” she explained firmly. “I’m not afraid of bugs,” I told her. “I like bugs, actually.” In fact, I’m married to one, is what I thought to myself. This was during a down phase in my marriage. I was there in Florida because he wouldn’t stop seeing the wife of his best friend. “We’re not doing anything,” he would explain. “What are you — nuts?” The wife herself was miffed at me. “Why can’t we still be friends?” she asked. I would speak to her only when cornered, and then only to call her names. She kept trying though, calling my house at odd hours to ask me how I was doing in a concerned, schoolmarmish voice. “Quit calling my house and quit screwing my husband,” I’d reply evenly. She’d sigh; I’d hang up. Once I took the phone off the wall and threw it out the front door into a snowbank. Eric retrieved it wordlessly, dried it off, hung it back on the wall. “You suck,” I told him.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I pulled the sheet around me and curled into my usual sleeping position (fetal). I imagined everyone in my life abandoning me, all the while assuring me they weren’t. I replayed a scene from several years ago: my mother in a hospital bed with Eric at her side, extracting a promise from him, he listening solemnly, speaking to her in a whisper, nodding, holding her hand; me in the hallway, exasperated and worn out, rolling my eyes, one last opportunity for defiance, sassing back even then. I started a low-grade whimpering to keep myself company. It was dark and dark and dark and then it began to be light and light and then dawn showed up. I used a remote control to turn on the television and page through the channels. There was a religious program on, a Bullwinkle cartoon which was the last thing I needed, a worm’s-eye view of a woman doing an aerobic workout, and CNN. I watched CNN intently, with the sound off and my eyes squinted almost shut. I kept remembering some footage I’d seen of a plane crash that happened a few years back, where a seat with a passenger strapped to it was thrown hundreds of feet from the wreckage. The seat landed in an upright position, and the passenger, slightly charred, was sitting quietly with an arm on each armrest, deader than dead. I replayed the footage over and over, trying to make the passenger wake up, but to no avail. At some point I went into the bathroom and threw up, then stared at myself again in the mirror, surveying the damage. My eyes looked like two red holes in a pink blanket. My stomach hurt. I found the telephone, a cordless job, and carried it out onto the balcony with me. The Florida sun was climbing, the air felt like hot, wet lint. The same old boats were making their way back into view, chugging along silently, leaving trails of foam that leveled back out into flat blue. I sat with the phone in my hand until there was nothing left to do but dial it. I called my own number at home and a man answered. He said hello about five times and then hung up. It was my husband. Everything was overwhelmingly bright, my eyes couldn’t stand it. I went back in to the king-size bed. Suddenly the phone, still stuck to my hand, started ringing. I stared at it until it stopped. When the digital clock said 10 I called Chicago. “Where are you?” Elizabeth says cheerfully. “I called you and Eric said you ran away from home or something.” “I’m in Florida, at Taylor’s sister’s house,” I say. “I’m supposed to be writing.” “You sound weird,” she says. “Jo Ann? You sound weird.” I am weird. “Why are we not talking?” she asks gently. “Are we okay?” No, unfortunately we’re not. I swallow hard and stare at my clenched and hysterical feet. My stomach still hurts.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  An alcoholic may have once enjoyed the taste, but now he is using drinking to numb and escape and avoid, and the last thing he’s reflecting on is the quality of the brew or the vintage of the grapes. And she used to appreciate food—the spices and the aromas and the art of cooking—but now her taste buds have dulled. She no longer savors every bite. She has lost her enjoyment of food as a gift from God that comes from the earth for our pleasure and sustenance. Her addiction, her turning to food for what it can’t deliver, has caused her to have contempt for food, and so she’s losing sensitivity. There’s a progression here. The loss of sensitivity and enjoyment often leads to what the scriptures call being given over to sensuality.12 The Greek word for sensuality is aselgeia. It’s the absence of restraint, an insatiable desire for pleasure. When our lusts get the best of us, they trap us. Whether it’s food, sex, shopping, whatever, what was supposed to fill the hole within us didn’t. It betrayed us. It owns us. And it always leaves us wanting more. And so we’re emptier lonelier hungrier more depressed. “He hated her more than he had loved her.” And so we go to the refrigerator and eat the whole box. We go to the website and watch every clip. We buy one in every color. We take another. And then we’re right back where we started. We’re momentarily satisfied, and then we experience letdown because it didn’t deliver what it promised. Which of course leaves us wanting more. The passage in Ephesians calls it “greed”—the word pleion in Greek, which means “more,” combined with the word echo, which means “to have.” We have to have more. But when we get more, it leads to . . . more. Lust does not operate on a flat line, as if we can give in and stay at the same level of consumption indefinitely. People who are not aware of what they’re dealing with will keep insisting that they’re fine and that they can stop at any time. But they’re “darkened in their understanding.” They’re operating under the assumption that lust can plateau at a certain level and simply stay there. But lust always wants more. Which is why lust, over time, will always lead to despair. Which will always lead to anger. Lust always leads to anger. Sometimes it isn’t expressed on the outside because it turns inward. That’s depression. When it goes outward, it will often affect what a person indulges in—darker and darker expressions of unfulfilled desire mixed with contempt. Is that how someone ends up at leather and whips?13 Food or clothes or position or approval or power or sex—it grabbed us and said, “You are missing out until you have me.” And it was a lie. It promised us something. It claimed to be the answer. But it wasn’t.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  121 In fact as studies have shown, those individuals who experience the greatest health and positive self-regard, throughout the world and in all socioeconomic levels, are those with strong group affiliations. Feelings and emotions have evolved, at least in part, to amplify the hedonic sensations of approach and avoidance. When, for example, we taste something that is mildly bitter, sensations of “distaste” are registered upon our consciousness. However, when something tastes extremely bitter (and therefore, likely to be toxic), we are more apt to have the compelling emotion of disgust, with the associated sensation of nausea. With this emotional red flag (disgust), we are very likely to avoid such substances (or those that taste, smell or look like them) in the future. In addition, other members of the group who see our reaction will be less likely to ingest the same substance. Because we may not get the chance to avoid a poison (such as a rancid carcass) more than once, these emotional signaling reactions are meant to be compelling to us and others, making a long-lasting survival imprint. This is why if you get violently ill after eating steak béarnaise at your favorite restaurant, you are likely to avoid this particular dish and even that restaurant for years—if not going to the extreme of becoming a vegetarian. By being able to feel things out, we are afforded the precision and overall adaptability that have put us at the top of the heap. There is a significant downside to this solution of imparting to feelings such a kingly executive function. If the emotional feeling systems were to fail and become disordered, as they do in stress and trauma, this disarray would reflect throughout the myriad of the physiological, behavioral and perceptual subsystems. This leaves us susceptible to fundamental misperceptions. A disturbing example of this flaw is when we detect danger where it does not exist—and, on the flip side, when we fail to detect it when it’s actually in our face. Another poignant example of our “feeling system” gone awry is the presence of every sort of stress, autoimmune illness and “psychosomatic” disease, which have been the bane of modern medicine. It has been estimated, for example, that between 75 to 90% or more of all visits to the doctor’s office are stress related. Fortunately, the evolution of conscious emotional feeling states provides, in itself, a remarkable solution if we can learn to register and respond to the inner promptings of our bodies. Our instinctual feeling-programs are the foundation for what allows us to plan and move ahead with purpose and direction. It is the fabric of what connects us to one another. When this critical map becomes disordered and maladaptive with trauma or protracted stress, as a consequence, we simply become lost. Losing our Way in the World: Serendipity Gained Ivan Pavlov was born in a small village in central Russia.