About

This is a blog about Things. Science things, political things, mental health things, religious things, funny things, and personal things. Whichever things happen to be on my mind.

The idea for this blog started popping up among those fragments of thoughts you have during quiet moments and grew to encompass things I want to say loudly. And as these Things started connecting the dots, finding each other in that half-aware haze between sleep and wakefulness, one phrase kept strumming through my mind like a warm chord: it's all right.

The phrase tantalized and frustrated me, yet it gave me peace. In the midst of the hardest depressive episode of my life (so far), I would pray and ask God to take things away, to fix them, to solve everything and let me get back to how I used to be. They were simultaneously the most heartfelt and the most wooden prayers of my entire life, and instead of assurances of a solution, all I got back was: it's all right.

It was comforting and maddening, soothing and enraging. I wanted a solution, a switch that could flip or a task I could do that would fix things according to my definition of what was all right. Accepting that things were all right felt like giving up, condemning myself to feel that misery forever and pretending to be happy about it. At the same time, it was all I wanted; solutions felt exhausting and simply the assurance that things were all right was something to cling to, something to trust in, a promise that I didn't have to fix things for them to get better. I learned to accept my feelings, to hold their broken forms lovingly and wait for the wounds to heal, while knowing that it wouldn't last forever...because it would be all right.

It's since occurred to me that the phrase underlies a lot of my strongly held beliefs about the world, such as:

• It's all right that people believe different things than me.
• It's all right that people make different choices than me.
• It's all right to try to fight for what you believe in yourself.
• It's all right that people have different life experiences than me.
• It's all right that people make mistakes and have imperfections.
• It's all right to feel whatever you're feeling, even if you want to change it.
• It's all right that I want to air my thoughts on a blog and self-centeredly expect people to consider the rambling naïveté of a 20-something-year-old woman.
• and...
• Trying to understand what other people are feeling is the best way to make things all right.

I believe that things will be all right, and that it's possible to know that things are currently all right, even when they feel all wrong. Things will come apart and back together, people will go forward as far as they can, and in the end it will be all right. In the meantime, I hope the things I write can be uplifting, funny, helpful, or at least moderately distracting.