The Archive
Essays, episodes, and reflections — one new piece of each, every week.
The Latest
THIS WEEK'S ESSAY
When Everything is Trauma, What is Human?
The field of trauma therapy has given us an increasingly expansive framework for understanding human suffering — one that now risks explaining nearly all adult difficulty as the consequence of a damaged childhood. This essay examines concept creep, the phenomenon by which clinical terms gradually lower their threshold to include less extreme experiences, and traces how it has reshaped the way people understand their own stories.Â
THIS WEEK'S EPISODE
Is Everything Trauma?
The word trauma has changed. What once described an experience that overwhelmed the nervous system beyond its capacity to cope now appears on social media infographics as an explanation for low self-worth, relationship struggles, and everyday emotional difficulty. In this episode, we look at concept creep — the gradual lowering of the threshold for harm-related language — and ask what it actually costs us to call the friction of being human a disorder.
THIS WEEK'S REFLECTION
You Are Allowed to Have Been Affected
For when something was hard — and you're not sure you have the right word for it, the right label, or enough of a reason for it to count. This meditation asks you to set down the search for a verdict and simply acknowledge what you lived through. You don't need a diagnosis, a guilty party, or anyone's agreement for your experience to be real.
Sometimes when I wake up, I just lie in bed and listen to the silence.
I sleep with earplugs, so the silence is loud in my ears. Dense. Almost humming. I can hear my heart beating. I can hear my breath moving in and out. I can hear my thoughts before they’ve fully taken shape. I can hear the swirli...
I was rubbing my son’s belly the other day while he had a stomach bug, watching his eyes track the room with that unmistakable softness babies have—the kind that feels both ancient and entirely new at once. There is something about looking into a baby’s eyes that stops thought mid-sentence. Not beca...
Lately, I’ve been aware of a particular kind of fatigue. It’s not the sharp exhaustion that comes from a single, difficult event, but the low-grade, pervasive weariness of sustained effort without a pause. It feels like having just finished a long race only to realize you are still on the track, and...
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