When a writer who has spent her career discussing grief suddenly claims she is unable to speak, a certain kind of silence descends. At the end of April, Cheryl Strayed found herself in that situation, announcing on Instagram that her husband, Portland filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, had been diagnosed with a “serious, fatal illness.” She didn’t say what it was. She didn’t have to. She obviously meant for the words to have the weight they did. The foundation of Strayed’s 57-year-old literary career has been personal loss. The 2012 memoir Wild, later adapted into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, was about…
Author: Jack Ward
After every Grand Prix, there is a brief moment that is rarely shown on television. After exiting the vehicle and removing the balaclava, the driver stands on the scales. Like a boxer at a weigh-in, it appears almost ceremonial, but the goal is completely different. How much of him has vanished over the past two hours is what the FIA wants to know. Most of the time, the weight falls between two and three kilograms. That’s about four to six and a half pounds lost, mostly through perspiration. It may be closer to two in the cooler races, such as…
People seem to be carrying a certain kind of fatigue these days. It’s evident in the slow exhale that precedes someone opening the news app and in the way that conversations at dinner inadvertently veer toward distant events. It’s neither quite fear nor quite grief. The low hum of a world that no longer pretends to be steady sits in between the two. The emotion beneath it is referred to by therapists as existential. Of course, existential fear is nothing new. Since Frankl wrote about meaning and Kierkegaard wrote about dread, it has been studied. Maybe the volume is different.…
Michelle, a mid-fifties executive, told her physician that she had always been the reliable one. Then, before her eyes had fully adjusted, she began to wake up at three in the morning with her heart racing and reaching for her phone. Her doctor recently shared her story in a newsletter, and it has become nearly universal. The same thing is being reported by therapists in the US, UK, and Australia: patients who have spent decades managing boardrooms and family crises are now collapsing due to their feeds. Oddly, the best intervention isn’t a pill, an app, or even something very…
When the same bridge keeps showing up on the evening news, week after week, with new cracks every time, a certain kind of fatigue sets in. You no longer notice it as much as you once did. Then, one morning, the anchor mentions that a portion of it collapses during rush hour, and all of a sudden, a stranger you will never meet makes your stomach tighten. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently that occurs these days. In the middle of winter, water mains burst, roads buckle, and transformers blow. A quieter thing is happening to the viewers somewhere in…
There is a coffee maker in the waiting area of a small private practice in Queens, but it is no longer in use. A few weeks ago, the therapist who oversees the facility, who is in her late forties and has been in the chair for twenty years, casually brought up how people talk about the weather. According to her, clients used to hang around before sessions. They sit down now, staring at the door and their phones. She didn’t notice the room’s tightness a year ago. Around the time gas hit $4, it arrived. There is now one or…
Nobody gave much thought to what would happen after Harnaaz Sandhu left that stage in Eilat in December 2021, his sash still warm from the lights. The cameras flash, the crowd lands, and then there’s this weird transitional period that no one takes pictures of—the part where a 21-year-old has to move into a New York apartment and instantly become a worldwide icon. People might overlook the human element. The meal, the jet lag, and the strange silence following months of rehearsal. She has now discussed gaining weight multiple times, and her explanations have changed slightly with each interview—something that…
Nearly twenty years later, a scene from Robert Kirkman’s Invincible is still debated on Reddit, and it has nothing to do with the buckets of blood the comic was known for. The panel is silent. After spending ten months in space and fighting a war that most readers couldn’t even pronounce, Mark Grayson returns home to find his girlfriend Eve has changed. heavier. fatigued around the eyes. As expected, the fans went crazy. On paper, the cause of Atom Eve’s weight gain seems almost unremarkable. Eve was on Earth by herself, coping with an unexpected pregnancy while Mark was away…