Grief may not end at the grave.

A new study suggests that the majority of bereaved souls—whether mourning a spouse or a beloved pet—report vivid dreams or waking sensations involving the deceased.

Far from being rare or pathological, these experiences appear to be a common part of the human grieving process, tightly woven into how people maintain emotional bonds after death.

In fact, people who dream of their lost loved ones are significantly more likely to experience their presence while awake.

This overlap between dreaming and waking encounters challenges older assumptions that such experiences are signs of denial, avoidance, or mental instability.

Instead, they may represent something far more ordinary—and far more vital to healing.

There’s a room in the public health clinic where I work most mornings — quiet, often softly lit — where families sit in a circle of mismatched chairs.

A tissue box rests on the coffee table like a silent witness to what’s about to unfold.

It’s here, in this space that feels both foreign and familiar, that the work of family therapy begins.

At first glance, it might look like just another meeting.

People show up late. They forget to make eye contact.

They sit too far apart, or too close.

But underneath all that is a kind of trembling — a hope mixed with fear. Because family therapy isn’t just about fixing problems.

It’s about stepping into the heart of something raw and tangled. It’s about telling the truth after years of speaking in code.

A growing number of folks are in committed romantic relationships yet choose to live separately. These people are not simply part of a logistical LAT (Living Apart Together) arrangement due to external constraints.

They are apart-ers—those intrepid souls who intentionally structure their romantic lives around autonomy, spatial sovereignty, and emotional self-regulation.

In many ways, the aparter may represent a countercultural posture against the enmeshment and performance-driven intimacy norms typical of Western relational life.

Rather than merging homes, calendars, and identities, apart-ers assert that intimacy can thrive with deliberate distance.

This post explores the psychological, sociological, and cultural underpinnings of the apart-er identity, situating it within broader trends of cultural narcissism, attachment diversity, and relationship decoupling from domesticity.

From Feelings to Filters

Let’s begin with the central irony of modern therapeutic culture: a society finally brave enough to talk about mental health… is also quietly teaching its citizens to detach, dissociate, and “guard their peace” like it’s the last bag of Hot Cheetos during a quarantine.

Mental health memes have gone mainstream. But what happens when “not giving a fuck” is marketed as a treatment plan?

We’ll call this phenomenon Therapeutic DGAF: a curated cocktail of boundaries, avoidance, trauma lingo, and the occasional side of serotonin.

The Birth of the American Shrug

Once upon a time, in the New World, long before TikTok turned nihilism into a duet, Americans gave a lot of fucks.

About freedom. About God. About lawn care.

And then—somewhere between Nixon’s jowls sweating on live TV and the last unreplied AOL Instant Message—the national emotional thermostat started cooling.

Welcome to the postmodern soulscape: irony is armor, detachment is currency, and emotional economy is measured in fucks not given.

We’re talking about the meme-ification of apathy, the industrialization of DGAF. We're tracing the weird, winding tributaries that spilled into the cultural Mississippi that now runs through Instagram captions, startup logos, and millennial memoirs.

“I drafted a 3-act monologue in my head. Then I said, ‘It’s fine.’”

You walk into the kitchen and your sister says that thing again.

By 2:00 a.m., you’ve mentally authored:

• A searing TED Talk

• A boundary-setting masterclass

A final, scathing “and that’s why I’m in therapy” mic drop.

But in real life?

You smiled.
You changed the subject.
You helped her unload the dishwasher.

Welcome to Silent Rehearsal: the mental, emotional, and occasionally poetic act of drafting unsaid confrontations.

It’s more than rumination. It’s the inner soap opera of the emotionally fluent and externally restrained.

Sleep paralysis is the uncomfortable overlap between biology and metaphysics, the moment when your brain reboots before your body catches up.

The lights are on. No one’s home.

You’re conscious, pinned, and—if you’re unlucky—hallucinating that something else is in the room with you.

This is not a metaphor.

It’s the central nervous system behaving like a terrified bureaucrat who lost the protocol.

The result is temporary immobility, sometimes lasting seconds, sometimes minutes, often accompanied by vivid hallucinations.

The experience is ancient, common, and often terrifying.

Modern neuroscience blames REM dysregulation. Earlier humans blamed demons. And to be perfectly honest, the older version makes more emotional sense.

There are some fears you grow out of.

Monsters under the bed. Lightning. Pop quizzes.

And then there are the ones you grow into. Like tax audits. Or group texts. Or clowns.

Let’s stop pretending fear of clowns is irrational. Let’s start calling it what it is:
A perfectly reasonable survival mechanism that your ancestors gave you so you wouldn’t trust creatures with smiles that don’t blink.

Coulrophobia—yes, it has a name—isn’t about whimsy. It’s about false signals, broken social contracts, and the terror of being invited into someone else's chaos performance without your consent. And it has a long, winding history, from ancient myth to corporate mascots to horror film legends.

This is my deep dive into why clown fear isn’t the punchline.
It’s the punchline’s revenge.

There are martyrs, and then there are whistleblowers.

And then, in rare tragic convergence, there’s Rita Swan—who started as a devout Christian Scientist and ended up public enemy number one in the First Church of Christ, Scientist.

Her sin? Believing that her child’s life mattered more than doctrine. A radical idea in some circles.

This is the story of what happens when faith meets fever and refuses to blink.

This isn’t just another listicle. It’s an excavation.

These aren’t flaws—they're encoded survival strategies.

Beneath every trait is a story of someone who had to adapt to stay alive.

People who suffered too much are often mislabeled: dramatic, intense, overly sensitive, avoidant, clingy, distant, or just plain exhausting.

But the truth is, these traits often represent intelligent biological and psychological strategies, forged under pressure.

This post attempts to dig more deeply into those traits.

Each is expanded with clinical research, examples from therapy, and contrasting findings from the literature.

Lydia wore white in September. Even when the grass went bristly and gold, even when the neighbors put away their deck furniture like creatures bracing for winter, she wore white linen trousers and a blouse that tied in a girlish bow at the neck. She greeted her son, Henry, with a kiss that did not quite land.

"My beautiful boy," she said, though he was nearly fifty and had stopped feeling beautiful decades ago.

Inside, the house smelled like dust, potpourri, and the leftover traces of a better era. The piano still had its crooked goose painting. The dog bowl—Maxwell, gone now ten years—still sat by the back door.

She poured two glasses of wine. Noon. "Tell me everything," she said, reclining like a woman expecting a portrait, not a visit.

"I called you last week," Henry said gently. "I told you about Elise’s promotion."

"Oh yes, that. Something with people. Or was it dogs? I lose track."

He smiled, the tired smile of sons who’ve already buried parts of themselves.

Welcome to the Trauma-Informed Beige Parade.

There’s a very specific kind of millennial kitchen. You know the one: fiddle-leaf fig by the window, wooden toys in a rainbow gradient, a gentle parenting book open next to the sourdough starter.

A magnetic chore chart with “co-regulate” scribbled in dry-erase marker.

Everyone has a Yeti cup. Everything is beige.

This, my friend, is not just a household—it’s a trauma-informed aesthetic event. It’s the vibe of healing. The performance of peace. The curated calm that says: “We don’t scream here. We sigh.”