Vermillion trees. Long, low houses roofed in red. Blue-gray mountains with frosted peaks. There's still snow here, in south Bulgaria, even though Easter was last Sunday at home and this Sunday here. Viki, our tour guide who chucks lukcheta — small honey- and mint-flavored candies named for the onions they look like — at us when we get a trivia...
You are 28 and you feel like a rubbed-raw carcass, scraps of flesh clinging to the bone. Your new therapist tells you that it must be both exhilarating and exhausting to be in your head, to process the way you do. Yes, you think — and say, because you believe in a fairly short line between thinking and saying —...
There is a phrase I have been embracing in my own life, and, by definition, have repeated to several people around me, because I am an external processor who needs to say things out loud for them to feel real: “Strong opinions, loosely held.” I didn’t make it up. (It seems like a strategist did in 2008.) But I saw...
Casting off I arrived in Ireland with two sweaters, both borrowed, and one pair of pants. My 15-liter daypack, clean but worn, was a relic from the last time I’d seen Seán, when we were both trailing around Latin America and met in a hostel dorm in Cali, Colombia. I didn’t need sweaters then. I haven’t needed sweaters since, really,...