2025-10-06 01:33:12
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of cohesion, predictable and perfectly self-consistent — the impossibility of that is the price of our complex consciousness — but a promise to own every part of yourself, even those that challenge your preferred self-image and falsify the story you tell yourself about who you are.
There is a peace that comes from this, solid as bedrock and soft as owl down, which renders life truer and therefore more alive. Such authenticity of aliveness, such fidelity to the tessellated wholeness of your personhood, may be the crux of what we call “the good life.”
That is what the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902–February 4, 1987) explores in a chapter of his 1961 classic On Becoming a Person (public library), anchored in his insistence that “the basic nature of the human being, when functioning freely, is constructive and trustworthy” — a bold defiance of the religious model of original sin and a cornerstone of the entire field of humanistic psychology that Rogers pioneered, lush with insight into the essence of personal growth and creativity.
Drawing on a lifetime of working with patients — the work of guiding people along the trajectory from suffering to flourishing — he writes:
The good life… is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality.
He identifies three pillars of this process:
In the first place, the process seems to involve an increasing openness to experience… the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness [is] the organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of himself, or of himself in relationship to the world. These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess.
The necessary illusions Oliver Sacks wrote of are a form of that defensiveness — they help us bear the disillusionments difficult to bear: that we are invulnerable, immortal, congruent with our self-image — and yet they render us captives of the dream of ourselves, unfree to live the reality of our own complexity. Rogers writes:
If a person could be fully open to his experience, however, every stimulus — whether originating within the organism or in the environment — would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of “subception” whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or a visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be “living” it, would have it completely available to awareness.
The reward of this willingness to be fully aware is profound self-trust:
The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is also more open to his feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. He is free to live his feelings subjectively, as they exist in him, and also free to be aware of these feelings. He is more able fully to live the experiences of his organism rather than shutting them out of awareness.
Out of this “movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience” arises the second element of the good life: “an increasing tendency to live fully in each moment” and discover the nature of experience in the process of living the experience rather than in your predictive models, which are only ever based on the past. When you are fully open to your experience, Rogers observes, each moment is entirely new — a “complex configuration of inner and outer stimuli” that has never before existed and will never again exist in that exact form, which means that who you will be in the next moment will also be entirely new and cannot be predicted by you or anyone else — that lovely freedom of breaking the template of yourself and the prison of your story. Rogers writes:
One way of expressing the fluidity which is present in such existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience, rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit preconceived self-structure. It means that one becomes a participant in and an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience, rather than being in control of it.
Such living in the moment means an absence of rigidity, of tight organization, of the imposition of structure on experience. It means instead a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organization of self and personality.
[…]
Most of us, on the other hand, bring a preformed structure and evaluation to our experience and never relinquish it, but cram and twist the experience to fit our preconceptions, annoyed at the fluid qualities which make it so unruly in fitting our carefully constructed pigeonholes.
By discovering experience in the process of living it, we arrive at the third element of the good life — a growing ability to trust ourselves to discover the right course of action in any situation. Most of us, Rogers observes, consciously or unconsciously rely on external guiding principles in navigating life — a code of conduct laid down by our culture, our parents, our peers, our own past choices. He writes:
The person who is fully open to his experience would have access to all of the available data in the situation, on which to base his behavior; the social demands, his own complex and possibly conflicting needs, his memories of similar situations, his perception of the uniqueness of this situation, etc., etc. The data would be very complex indeed. But he could permit his total organism, his consciousness participating, to consider each stimulus, need, and demand, its relative intensity and importance, and out of this complex weighing and balancing, discover that course of action which would come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation.
What makes this process most vulnerable to error is our continual tendency to lens the present through the past:
The defects which in most of us make this process untrustworthy are the inclusion of information which does not belong to this present situation, or the exclusion of information which does. It is when memories and previous learnings are fed into the computations as if they were this reality, and not memories and learnings, that erroneous behavioral answers arise.
Rogers paints a portrait of the person who has braided these three strands of the good life:
The person who is psychologically free… is more able to live fully in and with each and all of his feelings and reactions. He makes increasing use of all his organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible, the existential situation within and without. He makes use of all of the information his nervous system can thus supply, using it in awareness, but recognizing that his total organism may be, and often is, wiser than his awareness. He is more able to permit his total organism to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying. He is able to put more trust in his organism in this functioning, not because it is infallible, but because he can be fully open to the consequences of each of his actions and correct them if they prove to be less than satisfying.
He is more able to experience all of his feelings, and is less afraid of any of his feelings; he is his own sifter of evidence, and is more open to evidence from all sources; he is completely engaged in the process of being and becoming himself.
On Becoming a Person is a revelatory read in its entirety. Complement this fragment with E.E. Cummings, writing from a wholly different yet complementary perspective, on the courage to be yourself and Fernando Pessoa on unselfing into who you really are.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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2025-10-05 21:18:07
It is worth remembering that anything worth doing, anything bound to earn its keep in the house of tomorrow, takes a long time, takes riding the troughs of doubt with unassailable devotion, takes balancing a clarity of vision with the courage of uncertainty. This is true of art and true of love and true of every creative endeavor in the great work of composing a life.
Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865–January 28, 1936) was the age I am now when he became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.” The wild, wondrous worlds he created enchanted generations of children and influenced generations of writers. They are why Jane Goodall became Jane Goodall.
In the final year of his sixties, not knowing he would not live another — how cruel and how merciful that only hindsight knows each last — Kipling began setting down all he knew about writing, lensed through the story of his unusual life. He worked on the manuscript tirelessly until just before his seventieth birthday. Days later, he suffered a hemorrhage from which he never recovered. His wife edited the unfinished manuscript and published it as Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (public domain).
Considering the Socratic notion of a personal daemon that Aristotle popularized — an “unknown superfactor” of divine origin that steers you toward right action by mercilessly flagging wrong choices — Kipling looks back on the first visitation of his daemon as a young, unsure writer who “sat bewildered” among possible paths to take until the daemon whispered, “Take this and no other.” (Dostoyevsky must have heeded a similar voice when he so boldly wrote to the general of his military unit, pleading to be released from duty in order to become a writer: “I am convinced that only on that path could I truly be useful.”)
Kipling stumbled down the path, looking back on his early writing as “weak, bad, and out of key.” But over and over his daemon goaded him to give things the time they take, often leading him back after a long lapse to ideas he had given up on. “Again and again it went dead under my hand,” Kipling recalls of one such abandoned story, “and for the life of me I could not see why.” But returning with a new perspective, which life always gives us by the mere accumulation of living, he would reanimate these dead ideas into some of his most beloved stories — a reminder that waiting is not a passive state but a creative act that allows time to anneal the essence of things and find the right shape of a devotion, be it to a person or to a project.
He recounts:
My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw. I know that he did not, because when those books were finished they said so themselves with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off.
But beneath this mystical conception of the writing process pulsates Kipling’s uncompromising pragmatism about the mechanics of the craft, one of the hardest aspects of which is knowing when something is finished — feeling the tap turn off. He shares his exacting strategy for arriving at that point and trusting it:
In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and “when thou hast done, repent not.”
Kipling’s relationship with his daemon contains a wonderful antidote to what may be the greatest danger of success for any artist — becoming a template of yourself — entirely countercultural in our era of sequels and uninspired variations on a marketable theme:
One of the clauses in our contract was that I should never follow up “a success,” for by this sin fell Napoleon and a few others.
Kipling distills the central tenet of allowing your daemon to serve you:
When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.
Complement with Gabriel García Márquez on his unlikely beginnings as a writer and James Baldwin’s fierce advice on writing, then dive into this decades-deep archive of great writers sharing their wisdom on the craft.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-10-03 22:39:59
“Mistake” is another word for a working draft we are unable or unwilling to revise, a draft that stands at odds with the story we wish to tell about who we are and what we want. It is a judgment one part of us lashes on another. To indict as having chosen poorly what we once chose willingly is to renounce and dissociate from the substrate of us that did the choosing — a way of denying the stratified richness and complexity of being alive. In a truly integrated life, there are no mistakes — only experience, and the narrative we superimpose on experience to slip between our lips the sugar pill of coherence. There are as many possible stories to tell about an experience as there are ways to paint a cloud, to walk a forest, to love.
That is what poet Brenda Shaughnessy explores in her sweeping poem “One Love Story, Eight Takes,” found in her collection Human Dark with Sugar (public library) and framed by an epigraph from Roland Barthes:
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
It was a pleasure to read the final verse of the eight-part poem at the catacombs of the Green-Wood Cemetery as part of the live performance of composer Paola Prestini’s breathtaking record Houses of Zodiac, with Paola’s partner Jeffrey Zeigler on transcendent cello:
from “ONE LOVE STORY, EIGHT TAKES”
by Brenda ShaughnessyAs it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.
I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,when it would be truer to say nothing.
I’ve invented so much and prevented more.But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,
in absolute quiet. In extreme context.To see you again, isn’t love revision?
It could have gone so many ways.This is just one of the ways it went.
Tell me another.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-10-02 08:34:04
The aim of science is to illuminate the mysteries of nature and discover the elemental truths pulsating sublime and indifferent beneath the starry skin of the universe. The aim of art is to give us a language for wresting meaning from the truth and living with the mystery. Creativity in both is a style of noticing, of attending to the world more closely in order to love it more deeply, of seeing everything more and more whole — a word that shares its Latin root with “holy.”
This is why the greatest visionaries bend their gaze beyond the horizon of their discipline and of their era’s givens to take in the vista of life as a totality of being. How inseparable Einstein’s passion for the violin was from his physics and Goethe’s passion for morphology from his poetry, how difficult to tell where Kepler the mind ends and Kepler the body begins.
There are few visionaries in the history of our species who have changed our understanding of nature and our place in it more profoundly than Jane Goodall (April 3, 1934–October 1, 2025) — something she was able to do in large part because she never saw science as a walled garden separate from the wilderness of life. Formed by her love of books since childhood, she placed the raw material of literature — compassion — at the center of her scientific work, drawing on her passion for artistic creativity to make her revelatory discovery of chimpanzee tool use — that selfsame impulse to bend the world to the will that sparked human creativity when we descended from the trees to the caves to invent fire and figurative art.
The essence of Goodall’s integrated, holistic view of life comes ablaze in a passage from a letter to a friend found in Africa in My Blood: An Autobiography in Letters (public library) — that magnificent record of how she turned her childhood dream into reality. The day before New Year’s Eve 1958, visiting her family in London for the first time since her departure to Africa twenty months earlier, she writes:
It is lovely to be in an artistic atmosphere again. I realize now, more than ever before, that I can never live wholly without it. It feels so heavenly to be able to just sit in front of the fire & talk for hours — of cabbages & kings — poetry, literature, art, music, philosophy, religion. It’s wonderful, marvellous, terrific… I will stop now, because I have to wash my hair.
Shampoo, song, and science — all of it the stuff of life, intertwined and integrated, lest we forget that only an integrated human nature can begin to apprehend nature itself — that “great chain of causes and effects” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation,” in the lovely words of Alexander von Humboldt, who knew that artists too are all the greater for taking a passionate interest in the realities of nature subject to science. It was Humboldt who first conceived of nature as a system, who saw “the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter.” It was Jane Goodall whose science revealed that kinship is the software the system runs on, and whose life reminds us that just the kinship within a creature — the unity and harmony between all parts and passions of a person — is as essential to being fully alive as the kinship between creatures.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-10-01 10:16:26
You wouldn’t know it, looking at the tiny elderly woman in the white lab coat bent over a table in a halogen-lit government office, you wouldn’t know she had spent her youth doing science with her whole body: extracting herself from a deadly mudflat with stubbornness and applied physics; narrowly escaping permanent tendon damage after severe sunburn on the tops of her feet during a daylong barefoot tide pool expedition; managing to return ashore by manually rigging a rudder after her boat’s steering apparatus had broken and left her stranded in the open ocean; surviving blood poisoning in the pre-penicillin era after handling snails with bare blistered hands.
Trained as a mathematician and a plant ecologist at a time when seven percent of women attained a university education, Roxie Laybourne (September 15, 1910–August 7, 2003) had done her graduate thesis on moss — that splendid training ground for scaling attention. Struggling to find a job, she spent a decade working at the taxidermy and exhibition departments of museums. Eventually, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service — which also employed Rachel Carson — hired her at the small laboratory the agency ran at the National Museum of Natural History’s Division of Birds, expecting her to do little more than steward the existing bird collection.
Instead, she went on to pioneer forensic ornithology.
With nothing more than a microscope and a mind, Roxie Laybourne developed a revolutionary method of identifying birds by the shapes and patterns of particular microstructures in their feathers known as barbules — a technique she would apply to help federal agents solve murders, conservationists bring poachers to justice, and airlines dramatically lower the incidence of bird-induced plane crashes.
In The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne (public library), Chris Sweeney writes:
Nothing on earth compares to feathers, in form or function. They are a remarkable output of millions of years of evolution, first originating in dinosaurs and slowly morphing into a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, and textures. Made of beta-keratin, the same rigid protein that forms reptiles’ scales, feathers are light and soft, yet strong enough to withstand the punishing forces of high-speed aerial acrobatics and long-distance journeys over harrowing landscapes and through treacherous conditions.
[…]
For all the variation in how they look and what they do, most feathers follow a similar structural blueprint. There is a central shaft, the lower tip of which is called the calamus or quill and the upper portion of which is called the rachis. Branching off the central shaft are the barbs — there are pennaceous barbs that are bladelike and plumulaceous barbs that are soft and fluffy and tend to be clustered near the base of the feather. Branching off the barbs are tiny microstructures invisible to the naked eye called barbules.
Delicate and invisible to the naked eye, barbules need to be both clean and undamaged for their shape and pattern to be revealed under a microscope — a difficult task given dead birds are often covered in dirt, debris, and decaying matter, and cleaning agents powerful enough to remove these are too harsh to preserve the barbules. Part of the loveliness and defiant originality of Laybourne’s work is that she saw science not as a sterile endeavor separate from daily life but as part and parcel of the same messy, gritty stuff that is the raw material of living. Sweeney describes how she approached the challenge of cleaning the fine down she wanted to study, which she did with equal parts diligence and delight:
The trial-and-error process of finding the right soap stressed out Roxie. She worried that liquid detergents and dish soaps could leave behind residues that affected the microscopic barbules that she wanted to inspect. She settled on Ivory Snow powdered soap, mixed in a beaker of warm water. She’d drop the feather pieces into the sudsy bath and use forceps to whip up a small whirlpool. The feathers would bend and swirl, the barbs clumping together and forking apart. Stir too hard and the feather fragments twisted with one another — potentially bad news if the airlines only sent a little bit of material. Stir too gently, and the grime remained in the barbules. Depending on the condition and the size of the feather pieces, the water turned various shades of gray during the cleanse. Roxie would change it out several times as needed, until the fragments looked as if they had just been preened by their previous owner.
After they were sufficiently clean, they had to be dried in a manner that helped restore their natural fluff, another delicate process. On occasion, Roxie used the wall-mounted hand dryer in the women’s room. When the lab was outfitted with lines for compressed air, Roxie insisted that some feathers fluffed up better if she administered it in a musical rhythm rather than a steady, hissing stream. When dealing with doves, she preferred a cha-cha cha-cha-cha, cha-cha cha-cha-cha.
Washing and drying feathers is the type of tedious bench work that senior scientists often pawn off on lowly postdocs and grad students. Roxie found that she extracted enormous value from the almost ritualistic process of cleaning and re-fluffing the fragments, developing an intimate connection with the raw material of her new trade.
The key to all great science and all great art, the hallmark of the best experiences we can have, might be precisely this — the singing combination of ritual and rigor, applied with diligence and delight.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-09-29 00:06:00
A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves of Grass, it is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.
In one of the essays found in his exquisite 1877 collection Birds and Poets (public library | public domain), the philosopher-naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores the nature of that creative act through a parallel between poetry and personhood anchored in a brilliant metaphor for the two different approaches to creation. He writes:
There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One means the organic, the other inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids, — as lime and iron, — any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion, — fluid humanity.
This, of course, is what makes identity such a tedious concept — a fixity of past experience and predictive narrative that crystallizes a person’s natural fluidity, makes them impermeable to possibility, and is therefore inherently uncreative. True creativity, Burroughs observes, is rooted in this dynamism, this fluidity, this irrepressible and ever-shifting aliveness:
All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical, assimilative property… flaming up with electric and defiant power, — power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living organism.
It can only be so because we are a fractal of nature, the supreme creative agent, whose processes are a ceaseless flow of change and self-revision. Burroughs writes:
The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft, which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly, without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.
Burroughs sees this as “the essential difference between prose and poetry,” between “the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject.” A great life, he intimates, is more like a great poem than like a great teaching:
The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transit. Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.
And yet because these interior movements are fundamentally untranslatable between one consciousness and another, belonging to that region of absolute aloneness that accompanies the singularity of being oneself, there is always an element of the ineffable in all great creative work and all great persons:
There must always be something about a poem, or any work of art, besides the evident intellect or plot of it, or what is on its surface, or what it tells. This something is the Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed, and is perhaps the best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble personality… As, in the superbest person, it is not merely what he or she says or knows or shows, or even how they behave, but in the silent qualities, like gravitation, that insensibly but resistlessly hold us; so in a good poem, or any other expression of art.
Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then revisit Burroughs on the measure of a visionary, the art of noticing, and how to live with the uncertainties of life.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.