"This ain't the Heartbreak Hotel"

1) Song I've been listening to over and over since I walked in the door.



2) Some of the best sleep of my life has been at the Hathaways' home. I don't know if it's that mattress Lilly's always deferring, or if it's those worn jersey-knit sheets and heavenly feather pillows, or if it's the hilarious and heart-warming conversations that always precede sleep. Or is it the waking up to unbelievable quiet, with the faintest sound of mooing and quacking in the distance? The place is magical.

3) I'm struggling a lot in my abnormal psychology course, not because I haven't been studying (though truthfully, I have no time to study) but because I'm finding it incredibly difficult to believe that some of this stuff is real. Take dissociative fugue: you wake up somewhere else with a new name and a new life, and no memory of who you used to be. How does that even work?! It sounds like a cheesy sci-fi movie plot. (Indubitably it has been a cheesy sci-fi movie plot.)

But because of my abnormal psychology course, when I found out today that one of my friends is suffering from severe depression, I found that my reaction was terribly, horribly blasé. In my mind I scrolled through the DSM description, rattled off common treatments, imagined the symptoms. As my mind went off on a tangent about ECT, I forgot there was a person in front of me, burdened by how this was affecting the family. (I'm really sorry. And of course you know I'm praying.)

But that's what's so challenging about problems with the mind. The mind is not the body. You can't pin it down and slice it open and measure it endlessly. The mind is mysterious. And even though I'm learning to think about this stuff medicinally, the reality is that things like dissociative fugue and depression are frustratingly intangible. You think, "No problem, a little medication, a little therapy, good as new." But it's rarely that simple, because there's so much about the mind we don't (can't?) understand.

4) I returned the shoes, okay?