I never had a fear of heights when I was younger. I didn't really understand mortality either. My brother, Dad, and I used to tromp through the backwoods of Oklahoma and Arkansas, climb trees, hike up

Do you feel terrible this week? Read on! My eyes currently look like the dead sea. I've consumed enough iced coffee and puffy cheetos to fill at least 1/16th the stomach of a blue whale. I feel like I'm

Hello again. While I was on the beach in San Diego with my dogs, enjoying the surf and the sunset, you were in the dark woods, near the mouth of the hush place. You laid azaleas at the foot of the obsidian

How do you become great? I know one thing for sure: You don't become great by doing nothing. By doing the same things over and over again, in a kind of blunted, cow-eyed repetition. By returning to the

I hit a vein expecting there to be smoke, instead what came up was gold. And unsure of what I saw, I tried to convince my mind’s eye that it wasn’t anything special. That it only glittered in the darkness,

The phrase “Do one thing every day that scares you,” lifted from Eleanor Roosevelt to populate the fancy boarders of Pinterest memes and personal quotes to live by on OKcupid, is almost laughable. It’s

The most controversial thing I say is probably that depression is your responsibility to fix. But, what would I know? It's not like I've been standing where you're standing, glass in the back of my neck

Every positive change in my life has required a loss. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, we live in a universe where all exchanges require reciprocal physics. Eating dinner is the act of alchemy

At the time, it seemed like the righteous thing to do. Every bad thing I did, I did in the name of good. I felt justified in cocking my hand back. The rush of anger felt good even. Like a shield and sword

I remember searching for a gas cap at night on the dark ground in the freezing Oklahoman winter and I remember laying in the dark in a shitty room I'd rented out in an apartment, with a boy with his body

People always talk about how things are constantly going wrong in their lives. I'm talking about those unknown unknowns that can't be accounted for or anticipated, those things that seem to be the result

I spent the majority of my life in a disassociative fog. The best example of disassociation I ever found was in Jean Paul Sartre's "Nausea", in which he describes his own hand as a white worm,

When I was very young, I remember standing outside during a tornado warning, and the wind was strong enough that I felt like I was going to blow away. The sky was a deep gray, and trash whirled around

Are you patient, are you kind? I would like to be. Many times, I have just been frightened instead. Someone pauses to take a breath. "Hurry up and speak!" I want to scream. I write their sentences

When I began to fix my life back in 2016, I decided to divide it into two phases. I won't get into the details here, but the first phase was relearning how to notice reality, be more compassionate to myself,

I have this romanticized image of what it means to be a productive writer. I’m in a locked room, alone, with the moonlight filtering through a giant window and alighting the spines of ancient tomes beside

I spent most of my early 20s in bars and strange houses. I slept on dirty floors in cold rooms and in strange beds surrounded with red mirrors. I’ve stumbled in six-inch platform heels more times than

Hello everyone, it's been a while since we've spoken. I'd like to say I was out fishing for strange, bone-like sea serpents on an infinite lake of mist, but really, I've been sitting at my desk, writing,

Everyone knows that discipline is required to achieve great success, and also that we all probably need more of it. It’s the secret ingredient that is usually comprised of bitterness and self-loathing.

I was born out of a howl. I came from an angry valley. I've read that it's impossible to retain memories from before the age of 2, but my first memory is of a darkness without stars. My mother was a keyboard