Let’s Call It a Doomsday

The world might be a self-fulfilling prophecy, or it might just be a giant metaphor.

Maybe it’s a Gettier problem, where nothing is quite like it appears, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find something true.

I’ve only been given one body. I’ve only been given one brain, miswired and odd and mine. But my voice—not just what spills over my vocal cords and into the world, but the things I say to myself—that’s something I get to choose.

Reality is not a singular noun, even though the dictionary says it is. Reality is a plural, a million things at once, seen from the eyes of a million people at once. Reality belongs to the thing itself, and the thing itself is us. Our reality belongs to us, and we belong to it.

Words matter. Words are important, their definitions and histories are important, they mean something. Words tell every story that has ever been told, by fires in caves and castles and by prairie campfires.

You can’t protect yourself against everything. Sometimes terrible shit just happens and there’s nothing you can do.”

. But knowing is one thing. Saying it out loud is another. It’s a different kind of knowing, the kind you can’t come back from.

Knowledge is power, but it’s also responsibility,

. “You can’t make a person believe in what they don’t.”

Just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s a lie.”

sometimes I wonder, How do you stay? How do you stay when the whole system was designed without you in mind? When there are so many things you have to give up? When it’s cruel and unfair and wrong that you should even have to?