The sheets have cooled twice. The clock ticks like a leaky faucet. Somewhere, a refrigerator hums with moral judgment.
She’s already tried everything—no caffeine, no screens, no scrolling apocalypse.

Still awake.

The body’s horizontal, but the mind is on the night shift.

Outside, the world dreams. Inside, her cortex hosts a symposium on regret. This is what researchers call pre-sleep cognitive arousal.
Everyone else calls it the mind that won’t shut up.

In a country that ranks everything — burgers, beaches, even breakups — it was only a matter of time before someone ranked who’s the most miserable.

According to a nationwide study by Anidjar & Levine (2025), Alaska takes the crown as America’s most stressed state.

Congratulations to the Last Frontier: you’ve officially become first in fight-or-flight.

Stress, it turns out, may be the last affordable pastime in America. We export technology, import anxiety, and call the result productivity.

It’s the twenty-first-century performance of self: a latte selfie beneath a Rothko one day, a TikTok in front of a graffiti mural the next.

You might call it eclectic taste; therapists now call it defensive identity management.

In a recent study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, researchers Hanna Shin and Nara Youn (2020) found that people who score high in narcissism yet low in psychological security are more likely to be “cultural omnivores.”

They devour both elite and popular culture to feed two competing hungers: the need to appear important and the need to feel authentic.

Highbrow culture signals superiority (“I understand Rothko’s emptiness”), while lowbrow culture signals sincerity (“I still love garage bands”). Insecure narcissists, it seems, are fluent in both dialects.

If guilt is a bruise, shame is the invisible fracture.
It’s the break that never healed straight, the quiet distortion you learn to live around.

For folks with developmental trauma—what clinicians call complex PTSD (C-PTSD)—that fracture runs through the core of identity.

Shame isn’t just an emotion; it’s a nervous system state. It shapes posture, voice, and the very sense of deserving to exist.

I once had a client who kept a baseball bat by her bed after reading about a local prowler.

“It’s not that I expect him,” she said, “I just sleep better knowing I could swing.”

When I think about Mattoon, Illinois in 1944, I also thought of her.

The townspeople of Mattoon weren’t battling a prowler, exactly — they were fighting their own uncertainty.

And like my client, they armed themselves with a compelling story.

The very first time you’re bullied, you rarely really know for sure.
You just notice the laughter feels wrong — sharp instead of warm — and that somehow you’ve become the entertainment.

Years later, the scenery changes.

Cafeterias become Slack channels; locker rooms turn into group texts. But the choreography remains the same: one person reaches for power by shrinking another.

Bullying isn’t strength — it’s scarcity. Scarcity of empathy, of vocabulary, of self-worth. It’s a cheap illusion of control that predates civilization but now travels faster through Wi-Fi.

The good news? Psychology has studied this play for decades, and the ending can change — the moment you stop auditioning for a part in someone else’s insecurity drama.

Here’s how to stop a bully — without losing your dignity, your job, or your humor.

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

If you want to understand America, begin with the word bitch.
It’s our most compact theology — a single syllable that divides the obedient from the inconvenient.

We use it when women speak too directly, want too much, stay too long, or leave too soon. It isn’t about temperament; it’s about trespass. Bitch is the receipt issued when a woman declines to perform remorse.

In this country, female virtue is calibrated in tone. Be confident but not proud, kind but not naïve, ambitious but self-effacing. Step outside that acoustic range and the culture corrects you with a slur.

There’s a saying from the Deep South I love because it refuses to love me back: The Devil owns the fence.

You can stand on one side, you can stand on the other, but if you sit on that fence—paralyzed by “maybe”—you’re basically doing pro bono work for the underworld.

Not because you’re wicked, but because indecision is.

In couples therapy, I see a lot of conscientious, intelligent people frozen on the planks of I don’t know. They’re not fighting (which looks civilized), but they’re not repairing either (which is deadly).

The cease-fire becomes the slow surrender. Ask them how they are and you’ll hear a museum audio guide: informative, neutral, and somehow lonely.

The Devil doesn’t need you to betray your values. He just needs you to delay them.

No one sets out to raise a narcissist. You don’t cradle your newborn and whisper, “One day you’ll make every dinner conversation about you.”

Yet somehow, it happens.

Narcissism doesn’t bloom in adulthood—it’s cultivated in childhood, usually not through malice but through emotional distortion. It isn’t born of too much love but of love gone lopsided: too indulgent, too conditional, or too absent.

As a couples therapist in Massachusetts, I’ve seen this play out countless times—partners locked in power struggles that began decades before they met. What looks like arrogance is often a fragile self trying to survive.

Every woman knows her. You’re at a party, scanning the room, when Zoe appears—leaning just a little too close to your date.

You don’t know if you want to throw your drink or ask her where she got her concealer. A new study by Merrie, Krems, and Byrd-Craven (2025) says your instincts aren’t wrong.

Rivalry runs on two key ingredients: intent (flirting with your guy) and capacity (being hot enough to pull it off).

Evolutionary psychologists call this groundbreaking. Women call it Tuesday.

What Makes a Woman a Romantic Rival?

Gaslighting has become the kale of relationship advice—everywhere, overhyped, occasionally misused, and sometimes leaves a bitter aftertaste.

These days, if your partner forgets oat milk, you can call it gaslighting.

If they say, “I never said that,” you might decide it’s gaslighting.

If they forget the plot of Succession—clearly gaslighting.

But here’s the trouble: when everything is gaslighting, nothing is.

And that matters, because gaslighting isn’t just everyday bickering.

It’s a systematic pattern of emotional manipulation and psychological abuse. Misusing the term trivializes what survivors endure.

Once upon a time, Harvard was supposed to be the place where bullshit goes to die.

That’s what I believed when I was 17, clutching a number two pencil in 1970, sitting in a lecture hall in Cambridge to take my SATs.

I could have taken them closer to home, but no — I wanted Harvard. I wanted to breathe the air of the place.

This was the Vatican of intellect, the citadel of seriousness. You didn’t cut corners at Harvard. You didn’t lie with data at Harvard. You didn’t serve up sloppy casserole and call it cuisine.

And yet here we are, fifty-five years later, and the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health has been caught doing just that.