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In general the epidemiological data show that only 20 percent of Americans are flourishing. The rest are either languishing or just getting by. Maybe they remember a time in their lives when things were coming together easily; there wasn’t a lot of self-concern, self-scrutiny, or self-loathing because they were focused outward and contributing to the world. But now they’re just doing the minimum necessary to get by. This “just getting by” mode is not depression or mental illness. It’s merely people living lives of quiet despair. Upwards of 60 percent of the adult population feel like they’re going through the motions. It makes me want to share the news about this work and get people back to those times when they were flourishing.
By Angela WinterMay 2009An apartment swap; a furniture auction; Block 6, Barracks 4, Unit C
By Our ReadersMay 2009No matter where I turned, there was food, leering, taunting: M&Ms wedged at the bottoms of pockets, cookies in the zippered compartment of my book bag, a pound of Twizzlers jammed into the medicine cabinet. I consumed it all fitfully, bulking up, belching, squirming, farting. My children joked that I carried spoons in my pocket in case soup rained from the sky.
By Patricia BrieschkeMarch 2009He was bringing coffee in five minutes, at 6:30. She’d been awake for an hour and now sat on the hardwood floor, blowing smoke into the fireplace so her kids wouldn’t smell it. She’d picked up her cigarette habit again since his last episode, the one that had led to his moving out.
By Jessica HallidayJanuary 2009A hockey rink, a volume of Anne Sexton’s collected poems, Planned Parenthood
By Our ReadersDecember 2008Isabel is ninety-one and stands about four and a half feet tall. She has blue-gray eyes, a gray mustache, and four gray hairs below her lower lip. I often see her wandering the corridors of the dementia unit in the nursing home where I work as a chaplain.
By Elana ZaimanNovember 2008Cross-dressing, a lifelong eating disorder, the dazzling white image of life
By Our ReadersOctober 2008The summer after my father attempted suicide, I found myself wandering through a graveyard near my house, up and down the rows of sunken headstones and faded pink cloth roses. I didn’t know a soul buried there, and I didn’t know what solace I expected to find.
By Gregory MartinOctober 2008My mother left our home in an ambulance on a sunny spring morning while my sister, my brother, and I were at school. I was in the fourth grade.
By Valerie HurleySeptember 2008Ovid’s Metamorphoses; sixteen yellow, legal-size pages; the Sea of Tranquility
By Our ReadersAugust 2008Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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