The first word of the Iliad is rage.

Achilles’ anger is large enough to become an epic. His rage is destructive, but it is allowed to be enormous, and it becomes history.

Female rage rarely receives the same treatment.

Clytemnestra’s grief becomes murder. Medusa’s suffering becomes something to be feared. Medea’s pain makes her a monster. These stories seem to recognize that female rage has power enough to threaten kingdoms, families, and social order itself.

But I find myself wondering why male rage so often becomes heroic while female rage becomes monstrous.

Lately, in the hospital, I’ve been thinking about the Greek stories and how they handle anger. On call the other day, I caught myself thinking, There’s no point in dwelling in the anger. I pushed it down and moved on. There is always something to do next. Answer the page. See the patient. Finish the note. Keep moving.

It can be hard to know what I feel when I spend so much time trying not to feel it.

When I finally opened some evaluations, I saw a common thread: my quietness and lack of confidence. At first, my mind went blank. Then I started turning the words over, wondering what they meant. Was I not good at my job? Did I doubt myself too much? The more I tripped over those questions, the more I realized how little they had to do with patient care and how much they had to do with how I was perceived.

And then I felt it.

The rage.

Growing up, I learned safer ways to handle anger: make myself smaller, be respectful, stay easy to work with. I’ve carried that practice into the hospital, where I still find myself wondering whether I’m too much. Too angry. Too difficult.

Sometimes I worry about my face before I even open my mouth.

I’ve been thinking about the Greeks and the gap between the male heroes, whose rage could become legend, and the women whose anger made them monstrous: Medusa, Medea, Clytemnestra

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I know how quickly anger can change how people see you. If I’m quiet, I am seen as lacking confidence. If I speak up forcefully, I am called obtrusive, obnoxious, difficult. I know because I’ve been reprimanded for being too loud while arguing for what I believed was best for a patient, and then quite literally told I was “too loud.”

So I’ve tried to be thoughtful about what I say and how I say it. Sometimes I hold my tongue. But silence can look like uncertainty, too.

It takes so much energy to keep checking yourself.

Am I being too quiet? Too loud? Too angry? Not confident enough?

I want to be respectful. I want to be someone people enjoy working with. I also want to be allowed to be wrong, ask questions, learn, and speak up without having to measure every word before I say it. A mistake can feel like more than a mistake. It can feel like proof that I don’t belong here. Evidence against my gender. My race. My belonging.

But how do you learn without being wrong?

Medicine requires us to grow into things we do not yet know how to do. It requires questions, uncertainty, and the humility to recognize what we still have to learn. When every misstep feels like it might confirm someone else’s suspicion about you, it becomes difficult to let yourself be a beginner.

It often feels that the expectation is perfection. And perfection is a standard no one can meet.

I think of the women in Greek myth, whose roles as dutiful wives and mothers leave so little room for their own grief or anger. When they step beyond those roles, their pain makes them frightening.

Consider Clytemnestra, the subject of the Oresteia. Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter, Iphigenia, so the Greek fleet can sail to Troy. Years later, when he returns home, Clytemnestra kills him. Her act is horrifying. But it doesn't come out of nowhere. Her daughter was taken from her, and the person responsible returned home a celebrated king and war hero.

There was no justice waiting for Clytemnestra and Iphigenia. No way to restore Iphigenia. No public recognition that what Agamemnon had done was wrong.

With no room to grieve, Clytemnestra transmutes her grief into rage, and rage becomes violence. She kills the man who sacrificed their daughter for glory. The violence continues as Clytemnestra’s son, Orestes, kills her to avenge his father.

Finally, the conflict comes before a court. In the trilogy, the trial offers a new way to end the cycle: justice might replace revenge. Violence cannot undo what violence has done, and while vengeance may begin in injury, it cannot restore the people who were lost.

Still, the ending unsettles me.

Orestes is acquitted. Apollo argues that the father is the true parent and the mother merely the vessel; Athena’s vote breaks the deadlock in Orestes’s favor. The verdict rests on a stark hierarchy: killing a mother is treated as less serious than killing a father, whose life and authority the court places above hers. The trial ends the cycle of revenge, but its justice is unequal. The court judges Agamemnon’s death while Iphigenia’s sacrifice and Clytemnestra’s grief recede from view.

The new order contains the violence, but it does not repair the injury; instead, it gives legal authority to decide whose pain and grief matter.

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My experience is not the same as Clytemnestra’s, but I think about her because her story asks a question that follows me back to work: whose anger is understood as a response, and whose becomes grounds for judgment?

I recognize that question in the operating room. A male surgeon’s anger is read as justified: urgency, high standards, command. A woman’s anger, or even her insistence, is read as nagging, bitchy, and difficult. The same forcefulness that sounds decisive in one person can become a character flaw in another. And once the focus shifts to her tone, it becomes easier to stop asking what she was angry about.

That is one reason I keep returning to these stories. They show how quickly a woman’s pain or power can be recast as something frightening about her. Medusa brings that transformation closer to the body.

Her story changes across tellings. In Ovid’s version, after Neptune violates her in Minerva’s temple, Minerva transforms Medusa’s hair into the infamous snakes that turn men into stone. The world remembers what Medusa becomes more vividly than what was done to her. When the monster is all we can see, it becomes easy to forget how she came to be feared.

Alongside these Greek figures, I find myself thinking of Kali Ma, a Hindu goddess associated with death, destruction, and time. Her fierce image forces me to think about the standards through which women’s anger is judged. Kali is dark, wild-haired, bloodied, surrounded by signs of violence. By standards that demand women be beautiful, gentle, and contained, she can seem terrifying—even “ugly.” Yet she is divine in that form. Her power does not have to be made mild to be revered.

I think of that when a woman’s anger at work is treated as evidence that she is difficult, while the reason for her anger slips out of view. Kali doesn’t offer a direct answer to that experience, but she gives me another image of a woman whose ferocity does not cancel her tenderness or make her unworthy of reverence.

She holds together things we often try to separate: destruction and protection, terror and love.

The OR is not a myth, and women who speak up at work are not monsters. But I recognize a similar shift in how anger gets interpreted: a concern becomes a tone problem; advocacy becomes “nagging” or “bitchy”; the person’s character becomes the story, and what she was trying to address disappears.

I know that I continue to spend a lot of effort trying to make sure no one sees me as angry. I worry that if I speak plainly, my anger will become the most important thing about me. That it will confirm what I keep fearing: that I am too much.

But the anger is not the only thing in the room. There is the double standard. The silence I have practiced. The extra effort it takes to seem confident without seeming difficult. The fear that a mistake will mean more because of who made it.

I don’t want to romanticize rage. It can hurt people. It can narrow the world until all that remains is the injury. But I don’t want to confuse composure with peace, or silence with the absence of pain. Maybe the first thing anger asks of me is not to act on it. Maybe it asks me to notice what I have learned to overlook.

I am still learning how to speak without apologizing for taking up space. How to be uncertain without deciding I don’t belong. How to feel the thing I have spent so much time trying to swallow.

But I am beginning to wonder if my anger is not the most troubling thing in the room.

Maybe the more troubling thing is how quickly I learned to hide it.

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What makes a monster? I find myself wanting literature to give me a clear answer: cruelty begins somewhere outside us, and the rest of us would recognize it before we ever became capable of it ourselves. Emily Brontë pushes back on this idea in Wuthering Heights by creating Heathcliff.

He is cruel and unforgiving, but throughout the novel, we learn that he may not have been born that way. He was abandoned, humiliated, excluded, and abused. Since he was a child, people around him have called him “dark,” “gypsy,” animal-like, and dangerous before he had done anything to deserve their contempt. He is treated as less than human, then grows into someone capable of treating others that way.

Thrust into an absurd world where might is right, Heathcliff adopts a nihilistic posture of domination in place of meaning. Those who are abused often become abusers, not because they are inherently evil, but because abuse teaches a grounding logic about the world: the world is dangerous, people cannot be trusted, vulnerability is fatal, and control is safety.

When he is young, Heathcliff learns that love is humiliation, and tenderness leads to pain and loss. Heathcliff overhears only part of Catherine’s speech, in which she seems to degrade him and choose Edgar Linton, and he leaves before he can hear the rest. From that moment on, he learns that having one’s heart tied to another is a risk rather than a refuge. As the next logical step to avoid pain, he rejects love and replaces it with possession: his desire for Catherine becomes bound up with revenge, and even after her death, he cannot accept her as separate from him. He seeks to have her body exhumed, as if he might claim her beyond the limits of life itself.

When I first read this book in high school, I thought he was completely insane. But what unsettles me now is how understandable his turn is. Heathcliff’s pain is real, as is the pain he inflicts. It’s important to hold both truths at once, though it’s tempting to choose one: to see him as a victim or to call him evil and stop asking how he became that way.

Heathcliff understands the cycle of cruelty. He sees how the powerless can learn to pass their suffering down the hierarchy. But he cannot imagine an escape from that logic. Love, mercy, and solidarity seem to him like promises made by people who have never been crushed.

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The language of the Jungian shadow offers one way to read this cycle. The shadow holds what a person or a society refuses to recognize in itself: rage, cruelty, jealousy, the wish for revenge, and the capacity to exploit or dehumanize others. For a society, the shadow includes its own capacity for cruelty, injustice, violence, exploitation, and prejudice, capacities no society wishes to acknowledge, including Victorian England. When we cannot acknowledge those things, we push them onto someone else. Heathcliff becomes that “other”: the figure onto whom people can project their own brutality and then condemn for embodying it.

Heathcliff becomes the container for what society cannot tolerate in itself.

This reading becomes harder to separate from the novel’s racial language. Heathcliff’s exact origin remains unclear, but he is repeatedly described in terms that mark him as racially and culturally foreign. He is called “dark,” compared to a “lascar,” and associated with slurs used for Romani people. Those descriptions don't give us a precise identity; they show how readily those around him use his difference to deny him belonging. His racialized outsider status is part of the way the novel shows him being treated as dangerous before his actions justify anyone’s fear.

We encounter Heathcliff through narrators from the “respectable” world that excludes him. Nelly and Lockwood describe him as savage and brutish, while their own judgments receive less scrutiny. That does not make Heathcliff innocent. It does ask us to notice who gets to define him, and whose cruelty is treated as ordinary.

Heathcliff internalizes abuse because it is relentless. How long can anyone keep believing in a version of themselves the world constantly denies? Human beings require recognition to become whole. It is difficult to become what you have never seen or been offered. Deprived of love and the space to grieve, Heathcliff’s suffering cannot transform into mourning or meaning, but transmutes into power and violence instead. He becomes rage, revenge, and possession personified.

Heathcliff flat-out tells Nelly his worldview in one sublime sentence—

“The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them.” - Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights

When the shadow is not integrated, it does not disappear. It becomes autonomous. It ceases to be part of the self and becomes the self. Society projects its shadow onto Heathcliff, then punishes him for carrying it. This is the deepest cruelty: society abuses, degrades, and shapes Heathcliff into the very thing it fears, and then condemns him for becoming it.

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Understanding why Heathcliff becomes an abuser does not lessen his abuse. It is an explanation, not a justification. Instead, I think Brontë forces us all to look within and confront our own potential to become Heathcliff.

The novel’s other children make the cycle visible. Hareton is born into a family that would make him respectable, yet he is neglected and abused by Hindley and then by Heathcliff. Nelly sees him become the rough, neglected figure Heathcliff intends him to be:

“Heathcliff has achieved his purpose... Hareton seemed a personification of as much neglected, eroded rudeness as could be tangled in a human form.” -Wuthering Heights

Hareton’s blood and skin color do not signify innate monstrosity, as Nelly, Lockwood, and the rest of upstanding English society determined of Heathcliff. Hareton was made into a monster. Hareton’s story echoes Heathcliff’s: a child is denied care and taught to live without tenderness.

But his future changes when the abuse ends, and he has the chance to love and be loved. His relationship with Cathy gives him room to recover a self that cruelty had obscured. The novel does not make that healing simple or immediate. It does show that the cycle can be interrupted when someone is met with patience rather than contempt.

Heathcliff does not receive that kind of release. As the years pass, he becomes more fully the person he has been treated as: cruel, controlling, unable to imagine a life outside grievance. The society that helped make him an outsider can then point to his cruelty as proof that its judgment was right.

Heathcliff is harmed for being different, and later condemned for becoming harmful.

Understanding how he becomes an abuser does not lessen what he does to Isabella, Hareton, or others. It makes the question of responsibility more difficult. Where does the harm done to us end, and the harm we choose to do begin? Brontë gives no answer that lets us look away. Heathcliff’s history matters, and so do his choices.

Perhaps that is why I keep coming back to him. I want to believe that the potential for cruelty does not lie within me, that if I can identify the monster, I can stand apart from it. But Brontë asks us to look in a mirror and see the monster that lies within. The line between being wounded and wounding others is not fixed by birth or blood.

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We all have the potential to become Heathcliff if we are abused and deprived of love and safety. Brontë expertly shows that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956).

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

Society and law do not ultimately punish Heathcliff; human nature does. Emptiness, isolation, and an incapacity for love damn him. As Dostoevsky suggests, hell is not fire but the inability to love. Heathcliff creates his own hell by refusing vulnerability. His arc shows that power does not heal the wounds it creates; it preserves them.

Heathcliff’s tragedy resonates across generations because it reflects a fundamental human condition: we crave attachment and love in a world that does not reliably provide them.

Those fortunate enough to love and grieve safely can perhaps bear this tension. Those denied that safety often respond with the only logic they are taught — the logic of power. They attempt to escape vulnerability by clinging to control. But power cannot repair the rupture it creates. It only perpetuates the cycle until all that remains is isolation and decay.

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What does it mean to be close to someone? To know their stories, to recognize their laugh, to have been there when they could barely get through the day? There is something miraculous in two separate lives falling, for a time, into the same rhythm.

I have been thinking about Virginia Woolf because no writer I know captures loneliness in company quite like she does. Her characters sit across from one another at dinner tables, walk through crowded London streets, and host parties filled with people they have known for decades, while entire private universes move beneath the conversation.

Reading her, I recognize the strange experience of being beside someone I love and finding that I no longer know how to tell them what I am feeling.

The realization had come slowly, over months: I am growing apart from one of my best friends from residency.

At first, I wondered if it was the new hierarchy. We had started together, but my extra research year meant she was now my chief resident. I respect her enormously as a clinician. I trust her judgment and go to her for advice.

But outside those moments, I feel the distance when I am looking for my friend. When I’m exhausted or unsure whether I’m becoming the surgeon I want to be, she is increasingly no longer the person I turn to. We still talk. We still laugh. We talk about cases, attendings, and the thousand small absurdities that fill our days. From the outside, perhaps very little has changed.

But I tell her fewer things that frighten me.

During my second year of residency, one day she pulled me into a stairwell so I could cry on her shoulder. She understood. She was living it too.

There is a particular intimacy in suffering beside someone. You do not have to translate the experience before you are allowed to feel it. You don't have to prove you're exhausted enough to deserve exhaustion. The other person already knows.

For a while, she and I were standing in the same pool fire.

Now she is on the other shore.

And a strange separation comes from that, one I have difficulty naming.

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To the Lighthouse returns again and again to the desire to truly know another person and the painful recognition that we cannot completely enter another consciousness. Lily Briscoe longs to know Mrs. Ramsay’s inner life, but Woolf continually confronts her with the privacy of consciousness: we can approach another person, love them, observe them, even occasionally feel profoundly joined to them, but we can never completely occupy the interior world from which they experience their lives.

I once thought my friend understood me because she suffered beside me.

But perhaps I have also mistaken how little we needed to explain for how completely we knew each other.

For a few years, we shared the same exhaustion, the same hallways, the same fears, the same impossible hours. The same staircase.

Our internal lives moved in rhythm. Now the rhythm has changed

Remembering an experience is different from living through it. She has responsibilities I haven’t yet carried. I am struggling with things she has already survived. We can still care about each other without immediately recognizing ourselves in what the other person says.

But I had come to depend on that recognition. And when it falters, I retreat.

I leave out the thing I’m ashamed of. I decide she has enough to deal with. I wait for a moment when I will feel less exposed saying it.

Then, having told her less, I feel less known.

I wonder how often we withdraw from the people closest to us this way. We remember being understood without much effort and find it hard to admit we now need to explain. Sometimes we fear what will happen if we try. Sometimes we are simply tired.

The conversation continues. So does the friendship. But more of our lives takes place outside it.

I write so much about needing other people that I cannot help wondering what to make of this. We find one another. For a time, we are astonishingly close. Then lives change, experiences diverge, and the person we once told everything becomes someone we hesitate to call.

What is the point of getting close if we can eventually feel alone beside each other?

Woolf does not make that question disappear for me. Her writing makes room for both the longing to know another person and the limits of what we can know. In Woolf’s work, people briefly fall into emotional rhythm with one another without actually becoming one consciousness—they understand each other without fully knowing one another.

Maybe friendship is something like that. Not two people becoming one, or ever understanding each other completely. Just two separate interior lives briefly moving in rhythm.

Perhaps the miracle was never that my friend perfectly understood what was happening inside me, but that for a while, our loneliness overlapped.

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Nothing dramatic happened. She did not betray me. We did not have a fight. We may remain friends for years.

I hope we do.

But something has changed quietly between us: when something hurts, my instinct is no longer to find her.

I take that stairwell almost every day. Under the fluorescent lights, there are no marks or carved hearts, no tear stains or imprints in the cobwebs and dust.

No sign that we were ever there.

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As I watched a child die on the table, a sentence arrived in my head unbidden.

Everything happens for a reason.

I did not think it. I didn't come to it. It was closer to a reflex, the way a phrase surfaces when you are too tired to keep the door shut. The way a hymn you stopped believing comes back to you at a funeral.

It was obscene.

In a matter of days, the child would have turned two.

Two years old. A whole, even number, the kind parents say proudly to strangers.

At not quite two, a person is still entirely a person. They had a vocabulary. They had preferences and a way of refusing what they did not want. They had people they reached for. Things that made them laugh. A life already taking shape around them. Their family had dreams for that life.

Soon after the time of death was announced and recorded, the room went quiet.

And then, after a moment, we went back to work.

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Everything happens for a reason.

Life happens for me.

During the years I was trying to claw my way out of something—to crawl out from beneath a heaviness I could never quite explain—phrases like these seemed to come from everywhere.

Your trauma is your superpower.

Your wound is your gift.

The thing that broke you is the thing that will make you.

I wanted desperately for those words to be true. For a while, I held on to them because I needed to believe that suffering could be transformed into something meaningful. That my pain could not have been for nothing.

But over time, I noticed that they began to land differently for me. Instead of feeling hopeful, they sometimes made me feel as though I was supposed to turn what happened to me into something useful, as though healing meant finding the gift hidden inside the wound.

If suffering is redeemable, then perhaps the person who has failed to redeem theirs has failed the test.

Every time I could not turn my pain into wisdom, ambition, resilience, or some beautiful thing worth showing another person, it felt like another personal deficiency. As if surviving was not enough. As if suffering had given me an assignment and I was failing to complete it.

The phrase made me angry throughout my healing, and sometimes it still does. Because yes, I am trying to make something out of what happened to me. I am trying to live well in spite of it. But that does not mean I am grateful for it.

Something was taken.

There is a version of me who was cared for instead of hurt. There is a version of my life that unfolded without certain wounds. I will never know who that person might have been.

It took me a long time to understand that making meaning from suffering is not the same thing as believing suffering happened for that meaning.

Sometimes terrible things happen because terrible things happen. And afterward, we are left behind to gather what remains and try to continue living.

This particular rotation I was on at work was tough because terrible things happened to kids. It is hard, if not impossible, to explain that away. And so, I could not stop thinking about the phrase, everything happens for a reason.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan sits down with his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk and perhaps the gentlest person in the novel, and explains why he cannot accept the world as it is.

He has been collecting material for the conversation. Not philosophical arguments, exactly, but stories. Stories clipped from newspapers and gathered secondhand, each of them about children.

A little girl locked outside overnight in the freezing cold by her own parents.

A boy of eight torn apart by his master’s hounds in front of his mother for throwing a stone.

Ivan’s choice of children is deliberate.

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With adults, we are remarkably skilled at constructing explanations. They made a mistake. They chose badly. Perhaps they learned something. Perhaps suffering refined them. Perhaps, somehow, they grew.

Children destroy that logic.

There is no version of the story in which the boy torn apart by the hounds becomes stronger because of it.

And so Ivan makes his position clear: even if there is some final harmony, some future moment in which every agony is explained and every wound somehow reconciled, the price is too high.

I think about the child. Almost two years old.

How do you look parents in the eyes and tell them their child is dead?

How do you explain that a simple accident has divided their lives into before and after? That a future they had already begun imagining has disappeared? That birthdays, first days of school, graduations, ordinary Tuesday mornings—all the unremarkable things that make up a life—have vanished with a person who had barely begun theirs?

There is no reason I could give them that would not diminish what was lost.

No lesson large enough.

No future good enough to retroactively make it acceptable.

It is simply cruel.

Cruel to the child.

Cruel to the person that child might have become.

Cruel to the family who will have to return home without them, to a room full of toys and clothes and evidence that, until that morning, a future existed there.

It is a heartbreak I cannot fully imagine, because imagining it completely would be unbearable.

And Dostoevsky does not really give Ivan an answer.

Alyosha does not defeat his argument. He does not explain why those children suffered. He does not construct a theology elegant enough to make their pain acceptable.

He simply crosses the space between them and kisses him.

For a long time, I thought healing meant finding the explanation that made everything hurt less. Now I think perhaps some things should never be explained away.

Perhaps the answer to suffering is not to insist that it happened for a reason, but to refuse to look away from the person who suffered.

To sit beside them without demanding that their pain become useful.

To love them without requiring redemption.

There are things in this world for which I will never have an answer. Maybe compassion begins when we stop insisting that there must be one.

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The past month has been one of those stretches where the days blur together — 3:30 am alarms, lunches eaten standing up, sleep measured in fragments rather than hours. I’ve watched people die this month. One was a teenager. Another was a patient whose complications unraveled despite everyone trying to do the right thing.

There are images that remain with you long after you’ve left the hospital, and then there are the ones you somehow learn to leave behind. That second part has been bothering me.

One thing I’ve noticed since returning to clinical residency after three years of research is how quickly the wall comes back. Medicine teaches you to build one: one patient, one room, and when you leave the room, you leave the patient. You have to — there are ten more consults waiting, three more families to update, a pager that doesn’t care whether you’re grieving. There isn’t time to linger over one tragedy before another arrives, so you learn. Not because anyone explicitly teaches you, but because survival demands it.

The language begins to change. Among residents, you’ll hear phrases like “kill me,” “I’m going to jump,” “I want to die.” We don’t mean them, not literally — no one is secretly wishing for death between consults. The words function almost like pressure valves, absurd enough that everyone understands they aren’t real. They let us acknowledge exhaustion without acknowledging despair. I’ve been wondering why medicine develops this kind of language, and I don’t think it’s because physicians become callous. I think it’s because there has to be some distance between us and death. Otherwise every patient would become unbearable.

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Empathy is usually defined as the ability to understand and vicariously experience another person’s feelings. But what happens when another person’s worst day becomes your ordinary Tuesday? What happens when grief is no longer exceptional but expected? Is it even possible to fully experience every patient’s suffering without eventually becoming incapable of doing your job? Medicine forces us to walk a narrow ridge: too little empathy and patients become diagnoses; too much and eventually you stop functioning. Somewhere between those extremes is the healthcare provider we hope to become. The problem is that no one really teaches us where that line is.

I’ve been thinking about this through two novels: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both are, in different ways, books about dehumanization.

What struck me most rereading The Death of Ivan Ilyich was that Ivan slowly stops being treated like a person. His colleagues learn of his death mid-conversation, and Tolstoy tells us exactly where their minds go first: “the first thought of each of the gentlemen in that private room was of the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves or their acquaintances.” Beneath the arithmetic is something colder — the quiet relief of knowing “it is he who is dead and not I.” That relief is the same instinct, I think, that lets a resident finish one consult and walk straight into the next.

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His physicians are no kinder, though Tolstoy never makes them cruel. “To Ivan Ilyich only one question was important: was his case serious or not? But the doctor ignored that inappropriate question” — his real concern was “to decide between a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or appendicitis.” Ivan is left outside his own case, straining to translate a stranger’s hedging into an answer to the only question he actually asked. The doctors are competent, professional, respected. But somewhere inside the bureaucracy of medicine, a human being has become a problem to solve rather than a person who is afraid. The transformation is subtle: a human life becomes symptoms, charts, lab values, insurance approvals, length of stay, disposition — all necessary reductions, because no one can function if every chart carries the full weight of another person’s existence.

Returning to residency, I’ve realized how easily this happens, not because physicians stop caring, but because the system quietly asks you to divide your attention into smaller and smaller pieces until people become tasks. The bowel obstruction. The gallbladder. The trauma. The consult. Not the father whose daughter is waiting downstairs, not the woman who still doesn’t know she’s going to need an ostomy. The names slowly disappear, not out of malice but out of necessity.

Then there’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I’ve always found it fascinating that the man who becomes the monster is a physician. I don’t think Stevenson is criticizing doctors specifically, but physicians and healthcare providers do occupy such a strange position in society. We’re expected to witness tragedy without becoming tragic ourselves, to remain calm, measured, and professional no matter what we’ve just seen. Jekyll names the split himself: “man is not truly one, but truly two.” Long before Hyde exists as a separate body, Jekyll admits he was already living a double life, “committed to a profound duplicity of life,” concealing whatever didn’t fit the respectable surface. Everything uncomfortable, shameful, emotional, and chaotic gets pushed somewhere else, and eventually it returns as Hyde. Jekyll calls him, without apparent irony, “pure evil” — and that’s its own kind of tell. To call the unwanted part of yourself purely evil is to disown it, to make it a stranger instead of a self. It’s the same maneuver the doctor performs on Ivan Ilyich, turned inward: reduce the unbearable part to a diagnosis, a puzzle, a monster — anything but a person you have to take responsibility for.

Medicine asks us to perform a similar kind of division, not between good and evil, but between functioning and feeling. There were moments this month when I felt completely responsible for an outcome, when I wondered if I could have done something differently. If I had allowed myself to carry every one of those moments home, I don’t think I would have been able to come back the next morning. But if I never carry them at all, what kind of physician do I become? That question frightens me.

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Residents don’t have time to process grief, so instead we bury it. We make dark jokes. We say, “kill me.” We laugh, not because death is funny, but because if we don’t laugh, we might have to feel the full weight of everything we’ve seen. Maybe that’s what those jokes really are: not disrespect, but distance, a way of convincing ourselves that death belongs to language instead of the room we just walked out of.

Tolstoy and Stevenson arrive at the same warning from opposite directions. Tolstoy asks what happens when we stop seeing the humanity in other people; Stevenson asks what happens when we stop seeing it in ourselves. Medicine asks us to risk both, to reduce patients to problems just enough that we can help them, and to reduce our own emotions just enough that we can keep walking into the next room. Every health care provider learns how to build that wall. The harder question is whether we remember how to take it down when we leave the hospital, because if we can’t, there are eventually two casualties: the patient becomes a diagnosis, and the physician becomes something less than fully human.

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Before I had language for anything happening inside me, I had other worlds.

I grew up a nerd in the most complete sense of the word. Dragons on the covers of paperbacks. Maps in the front pages. Prophecies, quests, magic systems I studied more carefully than my homework. While other children were learning the social grammar of the real world, I was memorizing the geography of lands that didn’t exist.

It would be easy to call that escape. People do. I did. The word is almost always said with a slight curl of the lip. Escapism, the literature of avoidance, stories for people who can’t face reality.

Tolkien heard that sneer his whole career. His response is everything:

The critics, he said, were confusing the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

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I did not understand, as a child, that this was the distinction I was living. I only knew that some days the world did not make sense, that it could be cruel in ways no one around me would name, and that there were doors in the backs of wardrobes and portals in train stations, and I could go through them.

What I found on the other side was not avoidance. It was the first place I could look at anything directly.

Here is the strange mechanics of fantasy: distance creates honesty.

Take any question that actually matters — what power does to those who hold it, what hatred does to those who learn it young, who gets counted as fully human and who does not — and try to raise it plainly, in this world, in this year.

Watch what happens.

The positions arrive before the question finishes. Everyone already knows which side they’re on. The conversation is over before it begins, because the question has been pre-claimed by some camp, some flag, some creed.

Now put a second moon in the sky.

Change the names. Give the persecuted a different face: scales, perhaps, or magic the empire has decided is a threat. Suddenly the reader’s armor is off. They are not defending a position; they are following a character. They walk all the way into the question before they realize it’s the same question refused at the door.

Fantasy is not a way to avoid difficult subjects. It is sometimes the only remaining way of approaching them, in the way you view an eclipse indirectly, because looking straight at it blinds you.

Ursula K. Le Guin said it plainly:

Not factual. True. The dragon is not a lie. The dragon is the truth, held at a distance bearable enough to see.

If you’ve been reading this journal, you may have noticed something: I spend my weeks here with Dostoevsky and Brontë, and yet the novel I’m writing is fantasy. Sometimes these feel like two different lives, a serious one and an indulgent one.

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But over the past few years, I have come to understand they are the same life. They are the same questions.

Dostoevsky asked whether a person can be wholly good and survive contact with society. Brontë asked what becomes of the ones society casts out, whether monsters are born or made. Shelley asked it even more directly, and gave her answer a creature’s body so we couldn’t look away.

These are fantasy’s questions. They always have been. The classics I read closely here and the fantasy I write are not separate traditions; one is the other wearing armor.

So when I write fantasy, I am smuggling. When I write fantasy, I’m working through the questions that have followed me through every book I have ever loved: whether power born from pain can stay humane, or whether it inevitably recreates the violence that forged it. Whether love can survive the desperate need to keep it safe. What a person becomes when protecting the people they love starts to require the very cruelty they swore to fight.

Those are Heathcliff’s questions. Myshkin’s questions. Fantasy gives them dragons. The dragons are not decoration, but the distance that lets the questions breathe.

Chesterton understood why this works, and why it has always worked, since before any of these books existed:

Children do not need fiction to learn that the world contains monsters. They know. We all know. We knew before we had words for it. What fantasy provides is not the monster, but the shape of a confrontation. A world where the unbearable thing can finally be faced, because it has been moved just far enough away to fit inside a field of vision.

This, I think, is what I was doing at that lunch table, behind that paperback. Not deserting. Surveying. Walking the perimeter of things I could not yet approach.

There were truths in my life I would not find words for until decades later, some I am still finding words for now, slowly, in these essays. But long before the words came, fantasy let me stand in rooms shaped like my own, beside grief shaped like my own, and watch someone survive them. I could not name what I was carrying. I could recognize it, though, when it wore a cloak.

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And when the world fills with hatred that explains itself fluently, cruelty with good production values, violence that scrolls past faster than grief can keep up, I find myself turning to fantasy not less, but more. Not to forget the world, but to step far enough back that it resolves into a shape. You cannot understand a storm from inside it. You step into another world the way you step back from a painting, to finally see it.

Escape and understanding are not opposites. Sometimes escape is the only ground on which understanding can stand.

So I no longer apologize for the dragons. The wonder is real. I want to say that clearly, because the wonder was first, before any of the rest: the sheer magic of language building a world out of nothing, the spell of a sentence that makes you believe in a place that never was. That delight needs no defense. But underneath the wonder, something else was always happening. The prisoner was studying the walls.

Did those worlds let me out of this one? Or were they, all along, the only way back in? The long way home, through worlds that never existed, toward truths that always did.

Maybe the question every fantasy reader is quietly living with is not why do you want to leave the world, but what are you hoping to carry back?

I'd love to hear your answer. What is one book—fantasy or otherwise—that changed the way you saw the real world, and what did you carry back from it?

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What parts of ourselves do we sacrifice in order to be accepted?

There is something striking in the way Emily Brontë describes Catherine as a child. She is wild, dirty, unruly, almost animalistic. She runs across the moors with Heathcliff, climbs, fights, and disappears into nature. Her existence before the world teaches her how to be is one that belongs more to the landscape than to the drawing room.

Reading those descriptions, I felt an uncomfortable recognition. I knew what it was to be corrected for existing wrong — for being too dark from playing in the sun, too loud, too rambunctious, too much. There was a version of me that kept emerging into the world, followed by a persistent effort to stamp it back down, until what remained was the person who would survive. I learned early what Catherine learns slowly: that the self you are naturally inclined to be is often not the self you are permitted to be.

Children learn early whether they are fundamentally accepted. Not through explicit instruction, but through a thousand small signals: the raised eyebrow, the embarrassment in someone else’s voice, the threat or sting of something harder, all amounting to the gradual realization that only some parts of you are tolerated. We learn which emotions are permissible, which ambitions earn approval, and which parts of ourselves should remain hidden.

We learn to perform.

This division lies at the heart of Cathy’s tragedy. The way Brontë describes Catherine as “wild” or excessive reflects how society interprets women who resist containment. Female wildness becomes pathologized—a girl who is too emotional, too loud, too untamed is treated as something needing correction.

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Wuthering Heights sits on the edge of a changing England: industrialization, class mobility, and social respectability. The wildness of the moors is slowly fading behind systems of ownership and social control. Nature becomes fundamentally incompatible with Victorian society, literally and figuratively, representing emotional freedom.

When Cathy chooses Edgar Linton, she is not simply choosing one man over another. She is choosing a version of herself while hiding the other. She is choosing legitimacy, respectability, and social acceptance, which require sacrificing a part of her soul that is intricately bound to the moors and Heathcliff.

Their bond had always felt almost pre-social. Heathcliff and Cathy were happy not when they possessed each other romantically, but when they moved together through the moors before identity calcified around class and gender roles. The Cathy at Thrushcross Grange is not the same Cathy who ran across the moors with dirt on her hands and wind in her hair.

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Part of what makes this novel so devastating is that Brontë understands something many of us spend our entire lives struggling with: the loss of our souls within society.

You get the degree. You become “respectable.” You become the person you were taught you were supposed to become.

And you slowly die in the process. A fog replaces color. We become observers through a looking glass in our own lives.

Catherine’s line, “I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free,” is the longing for a self that existed before she learned to monitor herself through the eyes of others, before she learned shame, before she learned that being part of society can come at the cost of authenticity.

We all wear masks, moving through identities so often it becomes difficult to know which one is real. The danger comes when performance grows so complete we forget what lies beneath it and become strangers to ourselves.

This is what Cathy understands too late. The self she abandons never truly disappears. It continues haunting her, calling to her from the moors, demanding to be remembered.

In becoming the person who survives, we leave pieces of ourselves behind.

Cathy does not lose herself all at once. She loses herself by becoming the person the world can accept. The wildness that once bound her to the moors and to Heathcliff has no place in Victorian respectability, just as nature has no place in an industrializing England.

By the time she longs to be “half-savage and hardy, and free,” the self she is mourning is already gone.

What version of yourself had to disappear so the rest of you could be accepted?

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We have always known how to love the angry rebel. The James Deans. The Heathcliffs. The Mr. Rochesters. We all love the Byronic hero (I know I do).

All rage, pride, and wounded intensity, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is one of literature’s most enduring figures.

Humiliated, excluded, and rejected, Heathcliff answers cruelty with cruelty of his own. Since the novel’s publication in 1847, he has become feared, desired, and romanticized because he remains legible to society. Even his violence is interpreted as depth rather than foolishness. He despises society, yet never rejects its values: he wants possession, recognition, and control. Heathcliff’s rebellion is violent, but familiar. Society recognizes domination because domination is a language it has always spoken.

René Girard called this mimetic desire: we learn what is valuable by watching what others pursue. Heathcliff’s revenge is not a rejection of society’s values but an inversion of them. He spends his life acquiring the very things that once excluded him—status, property, recognition. Heathcliff’s violence shocks us, but his desires do not. They are our own, only stripped of restraint.

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Myshkin disrupts society differently.

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky introduces a man so sincere and compassionate that he seems absurd to those around him. Myshkin does not rebel through rage or pride but through radical compassion. He refuses the ordinary social logic of hierarchy, vanity, and manipulation. He responds to suffering rather than status.

And this makes people deeply uncomfortable.

Early in the novel, Ganya, humiliated and cornered, raises his hand to strike his sister, and strikes Myshkin, who jumps in front to take the blow. Full across the face. In front of everyone. Myshkin does not hit back. He does not even defend himself. He covers his face, turns away, and says, “Oh, how ashamed you will be of what you have done.”

He pities the man who hit him.

And the room cannot hold it. A blow, they understand. Retaliation, they understand. But grief on behalf of your own aggressor has no place in the social script. They call it weakness.

Where Heathcliff is feared and romanticized, considered a rebel against societal norms, Myshkin is dismissed. His compassion is read not as strength but as weakness. His refusal to manipulate others makes him appear naïve, childish, even absurd. Society has a word for those who refuse to play by its rules without offering domination in return.

Idiot.

What I find unsettling is what this reveals about us.

We can romanticize rage because rage still operates within the logic of power; it simply reverses who holds it. Heathcliff terrifies society, but society still understands him. He wants what it values; he simply takes it violently.

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Myshkin wants none of it.

Genuine kindness is more disruptive than any act of revenge. Compassion without self-interest exposes how much of ordinary social life depends upon ego, performance, and calculation. Someone who acts without calculation forces people to confront something they would rather not see.

Heathcliff terrifies society. Myshkin confuses it.

Perhaps that is why one becomes a romantic rebel, while the other is just an idiot.

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There is an unspoken contract in surgical training: you do not fall apart. You suture, you cut, you stand by the bedside at 3 a.m. with the lights too bright and the stakes too high, and you hold yourself together. No matter what. You see death. Bodies and blood. You keep going, no matter what.

It is an honor to be a surgeon. I love what I do.

But something within was breaking.

Move fast enough, achieve enough, absorb enough of the adrenaline that surgery provides in generous, addictive doses, and you can outrun almost anything. The hours were brutal. The environment could be cruel. There was a saying we all took to heart: no good deed goes unpunished. Kindness was punished. Sensitivity was punished. Goodness was punished.

I kept going, the way you keep swimming when you don’t know how deep the water is, not out of confidence, but because stopping seems like the more dangerous choice.

I wore that mask for years.

But I also knew. I felt it. That if I kept going, I would crash. Hard.

What I didn’t understand then was that I was drifting. The current carried me forward, and I let it, and with each year, I found myself farther from something I couldn’t quite name. A solidity. A ground. Myself. But “myself” was a vague term. I did not even know what that meant.

In the middle of residency, we can take a few years off to do research with no clinical duties. No overnight calls. Time to think. I had wanted this. And when it arrived, I discovered that the adrenaline I’d been swimming in was also the thing keeping me afloat. Without it, the water stilled. And in the stillness, I sank.

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There was a hole inside me I could never name. I tried productivity; if I did enough, maybe it would close. I tried running—miles every day—until the body exhausted into silence. I got badly injured, and the running stopped. I was left alone with whatever this was: a weight, a fog, a darkness that seeped into everything.

I remember a car wreck flashing in my mind, not a wish, but an image that came unbidden, a premonition of what would happen if I kept going this way. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to live. I just knew, with a clarity that frightened me, that I could not keep living like this.

I had spent my life in a world that rewarded performance and punished feeling. I thought the darkness and sensitivity were defects. I was sure I was defective. Maladapted to life. It’s not that everyone around me was perfectly fine. My friends struggled. But it always felt like I was struggling more. Like I was hanging off a precipice, my nails clawed into the rubble, hanging on for dear life.

The gap between them and me felt like evidence of something shameful. Maybe I was simply too weak for this life.

Then I read James Baldwin.

His letter to his nephew, written with the kind of love that does not flinch, cracked something open. Baldwin understood masks. He wrote about them with the clarity of someone who had paid the full cost of wearing one.

And for the first time, I felt seen.

One of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century was grappling, openly and without shame, with pain I recognized as my own. Then Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, asked the oldest question: how do we go on? And Dostoevsky, splitting the human soul open on the page and finding, inside the darkness, something irreducible.

I was not the only one. I was not weak. I was a person struggling with real things, in a world that had given me no language for them, until now.

Baldwin’s letter gave me something more specific, too. He writes about love, the unconditional kind, the foundational kind, the kind that tells a child you are not a mistake before the world has a chance to say otherwise. Until I read this essay, I did not believe in unconditional love. Relationships, all of them, were transactional.

Reading Baldwin’s essay, I felt a recognition so sharp it was almost physical. That was what had been missing. Not achievement. Not the next milestone. The simple, bedrock thing I had never been given, and had spent years trying to replace with a foundation made from productivity instead. No wonder I felt like a plastic bag in the wind: present, visible, moving, but untethered.

And Camus’s answer that we make meaning, and the making is enough, was the first thing that felt true in a long time. Not comforting. True.

I began writing. In the margins of books first. Then, in the notes app on my phone and laptop, early in the morning, when the world was quiet. The writing was not good. It didn’t need to be. It was doing something different, giving form to what had been formless, building a foundation out of words in the place where there had only been a void.

I had spent years turning pain into productivity. Writing refused that transaction. It wanted honesty. Stillness. A stillness in which I would not drown. The willingness to sit with a feeling long enough to find out what it actually was. Parts of me that had withered, a sensitivity I had learned to suppress, a capacity for feeling I had been trained to distrust, began, tentatively, to return.

When I wrote my tears bled into ink. With each stroke of my pen, I could feel myself becoming, existing once more.

Writing connected me to something I hadn’t known I needed: souls across time and space who had felt the depths of human pain without looking away.

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I didn’t just write essays and reflections. I started writing fiction and fantasy. I found myself playing with words, channeling my observations, reflections, and thoughts into made-up worlds where I could test ideas and characters. I could explore trauma that was too difficult for me to write about in the first person.

Writing brought me home.

We talk about searching for light in the darkness. But my journey was and continues to be about something different: learning to accept the darkness itself. What I found in the pages were not lanterns but companions: writers who sat beside me in the dark. Afraid, but unshakeable.

The shadow is what we all have in common. It is where compassion is born. Only when we can sit with the darkness in ourselves can we truly sit with the darkness of others. The shadow is where our shared humanity is forged.

That is why Read Yourself exists.

Books saved me.

I don’t think books substitute for the other work of therapy, community, and the slow, difficult labor of healing.

But I hope that by examining literature together, we can all see that the greatest minds who ever lived felt it too, wrote it down, and left it for us. That feeling deeply is not a defect. That there is a difference between the mask and the face beneath it.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading what I have to say. Thank you for making this a safe space where we can use literature to examine life together.

Read Yourself is where I take the mask off. I hope you’ll do the same.

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There is something books can do that almost nothing else can: let you live inside a life that is not yours.

Not observe it. Not study it. Live inside it. Feel the particular weight of a particular morning, the texture of a fear you have never had reason to name, the shape of a loss that your own history has never forced upon you. This is what we mean when we talk about empathy. Not sympathy, which keeps its distance. Empathy, which crosses that divide.

Juneteenth feels like the right day to sit with that. June 19, 1865, the day enslaved people in Texas learned they were free, is a reminder that there is always more to know and more to understand. That the full picture of any human experience is wider than what we were taught, wider than what we have seen, wider than what we can imagine without help.

These books are the help.

They will not tell you what to think. They will do something harder: they will ask you to see. To pause at the edge of an experience that is not yours and recognize, with some humility, that you are only beginning to understand it.

That is the whole point of reading, I think.

Some of these books are novels. Some are history, journalism, essay. They are all, in the end, asking us to inhabit something larger than our own experience.

Nineteen books. One for each day of June that leads here.

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Fiction

Beloved — Toni Morrison (1987)

A woman escapes slavery and commits an act so devastating, so unthinkable, and so utterly comprehensible that Morrison needed an entire novel to make us understand it. This is one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. Read it slowly, and don’t rush past the parts that break you. That’s where the book lives.

The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison (1970)

Morrison’s first novel. A young Black girl named Pecola Breedlove prays for blue eyes, believing that if she had them, the world would love her. What Morrison does with this wish — the tenderness of it, and the devastation — is extraordinary.

If Beale Street Could Talk — James Baldwin (1974)

A love story. Also an indictment. Also, somehow, a psalm. Tish and Fonny are young and in love and the world is about to dismantle them, because that is what it does to people it has decided to see only in part. Baldwin understood that insisting on someone’s full humanity is a radical act. This novel is that insistence.

The Underground Railroad — Colson Whitehead (2016)

Whitehead takes the metaphor literally: the Underground Railroad is a real railroad, with tunnels, stations, and conductors running beneath the antebellum South. What he does with this conceit, and what he does to you, is extraordinary. Pulitzer Prize. Every page earns it.

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Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison (1977)

A man called Milkman Dead sets out looking for gold and finds something else entirely: his own history, his family’s history, what was taken and what survived. Morrison at her most mythic. The ending has lived in me for years, and I have never fully been able to explain why.

James — Percival Everett (2024)

Huck Finn retold from Jim’s perspective. Except Jim, who calls himself James, is not the simple, loyal figure Twain wrote. He is a fully realized man with an interior life Twain couldn’t or wouldn’t give him. James has spent his entire life performing a version of himself that white people find legible and therefore safe. A novel about who tells the story, and what disappears when they don’t. Pulitzer Prize, 2024.

The Nickel Boys — Colson Whitehead (2019)

Based on the true history of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, a reform school where Black children were abused systematically for decades. Lean, spare, devastating. Whitehead strips every sentence down to what it must carry and nothing else. Second Pulitzer.

Juneteenth — Ralph Ellison (revised ed., 2019)

Ellison spent forty years writing the follow-up to Invisible Man and never finished it. What exists is extraordinary anyway: a meditation on identity, on Blackness, on America, on the impossibility of fully becoming who you were born to be. The title alone is doing something. Read it knowing it is a fragment. It will still break something open.

Nonfiction & Essays

The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin (1963)

Baldwin’s letter to his nephew is perhaps the most beautiful thing ever written about the cost of rage and the requirements of love. It is not a comfort. It is a confrontation dressed in the language of tenderness. He does not offer resolution, but something tougher: the insistence that love is not passive, that it demands you see the world as it is and refuse to be destroyed by it.

One of my favorite books of all time. Read it slowly. It deserves every second.

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Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin (1955)

The essays where Baldwin first worked out who he was and what he owed to the truth. The title essay, written while his father lay dying and Harlem burned, is the kind of piece that makes you put the book down and stare at the ceiling. The brutal honesty with which he examines the world forces us to confront the stories we tell ourselves — about where we come from, about who we blame, and about what grief and rage have in common and due to the human soul.

Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own — Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (2020)

Glaude uses Baldwin as his guide through the failures and possibilities of American democracy, essentially asking what Baldwin would say to us now. Part biography, part meditation, part diagnosis. If you have never read Baldwin, start here. If you have read everything Baldwin wrote, read this next. Either way, this brilliant book meets you where you are.

Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)

Written as a letter to his son, Coates meditates on what it means to live inside a Black body in America — the vulnerability of it, the beauty of it, the specific terror of it. He does not offer hope in the traditional sense. He offers something harder and more honest: clarity. The form mirrors the content. This is a book about inheritance, written in the shape of inheritance.

The Message — Ta-Nehisi Coates (2023)

Three dispatches from three places — Atlanta, Dakar, the West Bank — thinking through the stories we tell about people and why those stories matter more than almost anything else. His most recent book, and perhaps his most unsettling.

The Red Record — Ida B. Wells (1895)

Published over a hundred years ago. Wells documented lynching in America with the precision of a scientist and the fury of someone who understood exactly what she was doing — making it impossible for anyone to claim they didn’t know. This is one of the bravest acts of journalism in American history. Reading it now, in 2026, is not a comfortable experience. It should not be.

Caste — Isabel Wilkerson (2020)

Wilkerson’s argument is this: what America built is not simply racism but a caste system: a rigid, largely invisible hierarchy that shapes every interaction, every institution, every life. She draws comparisons with Nazi Germany and India’s caste system, not to conflate but to illuminate structural logic. A book that reorganizes how we see. Things that seemed random begin to look like a system, and systems are harder to look away from than individual acts.

The 1619 Project — ed. Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021)

The expanded book version of the New York Times project asked: What if we centered the story of America around 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived, rather than 1776? Essays, poems, fiction. An act of historical imagination. Whatever you have heard about the controversy surrounding it, read the actual book before you decide what you think. That is, as ever, the only honest place to start.

Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage — Heather Ann Thompson (2026)

In 1984, a white man on a New York City subway shot four Black teenagers when one asked him for five dollars. Thompson, whose Blood in the Water won the Pulitzer for its account of the Attica uprising, turns this single moment into an excavation of something much larger: how fear becomes a story, how that story is told by people in power, and what it costs the people against whom it is told. Published this year. Already essential.

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A Black Women’s History of the United States — Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross (2020)

Histories of Black America often center on Black men. This one doesn’t. Berry and Gross trace the lives of Black women from before 1619 through the present: their resistance, their labor, their creative and political lives, their refusal to be erased from the record. A corrective and a revelation, both at once.

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America — Michael Harriot (2023)

History written for people who were lied to by their textbooks — which is most of us. Harriot is a journalist who covers race in America with clarity and wit and no patience for comfortable omissions. Different in register from the other books on this list, and deliberately so. That difference is the point.

What does it mean to remember something that was deliberately withheld? And what do we owe to the stories that were kept anyway, passed down in novels, in essays, in journalism, in testimony, despite everything?

If one of these books finds you where you are, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Summer reading is permission to sit somewhere warm and let a book do something to you. These are the ones I keep returning to, depending on how I want the afternoons and evenings to feel.

Grab a comfy seat, a cup of tea, and enjoy.

For the ache of something you can’t name yet:

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Anne Elliot was persuaded, at nineteen, to give up the man she loved. By the time the novel opens, she has spent eight years becoming very good at being fine. Austen is often read as a novelist of wit and social comedy, and she is, but Persuasion is something else entirely. It is a novel about what suppression costs, about the slow erosion of a self that keeps making room for everyone else. The letter at the end is one of the most quietly devastating things in English literature. I read it and had to put the book down for a minute. I randomly still think about that letter sometimes because the writing makes my heart ache. Hot take, but this might be my favorite Austen novel.

For the long, slow feeling of time

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Set almost entirely over two summers, years apart. Nothing happens, and everything happens. Woolf wrote consciousness like weather: shifting, layered, full of what cannot be said aloud. This is a book about grief, what time does to love, and what it means to try to make something that lasts. It asks for patience. It repays it completely.

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For when you want to feel fully alive

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The prose here is warm in the way that actual summer is warm — it gets into you. Janie Crawford spends her life being told who she is by people who need her to be smaller than she is, and the novel is her long, hard, gorgeous process of finding out what she actually wants. Hurston wrote this in seven weeks, and it shows in the best possible way: it has the feeling of something that needed to get out.

For when you need to remember what wanting something feels like

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

Florence. Heat. The specific brightness of realizing, for the first time, what you actually want. Forster wrote this as a comedy, but beneath it lies something serious: a study of what happens when we choose the respectable life over the true one. It is warm in a way that gets into your chest. The kind of book that makes you want to book a flight somewhere and live the life calling to you.

For a long afternoon with nowhere to be

One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez

This is the book you read when you have enough time to let it swallow you. Lush, humid, sprawling across generations, it reads like a dream you’re half-convinced you’ve had before. García Márquez understood that solitude is not the absence of people. It is what happens inside a person, regardless. Every character in this novel is alone in a specific, irreducible way, and somehow that makes it one of the most human books I’ve ever read. (Also, one of my favorite books, ever.)

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For the feeling of wanting something you’ve already missed

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Newland Archer falls in love with the wrong woman at the wrong time in the wrong society, and he knows it, and he does nothing. Wharton is ruthless about what propriety costs, not dramatically, but slowly, over years, in the accumulation of things unsaid. The final scene of this novel will stay with you in the particular way that quiet devastation does.

For when you’re ready to surrender entirely

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

This is not a book you read. It is a book you enter and, if you let it, never quite leave. Proust understood that memory is not a record but an experience, involuntary and total, arriving without warning in the taste of a madeleine or the smell of a room. The first volume alone contains more psychological truth than most complete novels. Read slowly. There is no other way.

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My family escaped a civil war. Both sides committed atrocities. Both sides believed, with complete sincerity, that they were in the right.

The death of a child was necessary. The destruction of a people was the only way. There was no other choice.

It took me much longer to understand that this reasoning was not the exception; it is the rule.

That is what I keep coming back to: not cruelty that announces itself, but the kind that wears the right words, makes the right gestures, maintains the right expression of concern, and causes harm anyway, without ever once questioning its own goodness.

Dostoevsky understood this. He built a novel around it.

A system does not need cruel people to cause cruelty. It only needs people who believe in their righteousness enough to never question their beliefs.

In The Idiot, the question that haunts every social interaction is not “what is the right thing to do?” The question is “how will this look?” Dostoevsky uses ordinary interactions and conversations to show that a system operating from a place of innocence is usually run not by monsters, but by people with a very good reason for everything they do. People who sleep well, people who, if asked, would say they are on the right side.

The question Dostoevsky is really asking is whether, in some configuration, we are one of them.

In The Idiot, reputation becomes morality. Respectability substitutes for goodness. Characters obsess over appearances: status, image, propriety, but actual compassion, the kind that costs something, is treated as naïve, embarrassing, even absurd.

And then there is Myshkin and Nastasya.

Everyone has an opinion about Nastasya. Everyone judges her. Her suffering becomes public entertainment that is discussed at dinner parties, passed around drawing rooms, and consumed as drama by people who continue to regard themselves as decent.

What almost no one does is help her.

Not only is she wounded by very socialites who consider themselves reputable (with society’s full endorsement), but her wounds become a spectacle for those same people. Society condemns her while feeding on the drama of her destruction. Her pain becomes a stage upon which others perform their virtue.

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What Myshkin reveals, simply by responding to her as a human being rather than a social object, is the double standard at the heart of society's morality. Society does not thank him for the revelation. They call him an idiot and close ranks. It is always easier to dismiss the person who shows us the gap than to examine what the gap says about ourselves.

Camus, writing a century later, gave us the same portrait, but from the inside.

Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator of The Fall, is a man who has spent his life believing himself good: successful, admired, generous, respected. He helps the blind cross streets. He defends the wrongly accused. He receives constant affirmation, from others and from himself, that he is a moral person.

And then, one night, he watches a woman fall from a bridge. He hears the splash below. He does nothing. He goes home.

What follows is not guilt in the ordinary sense. It is something even more uncomfortable: the slow recognition that his self-image had always been falsely constructed. His kindness often needed an audience. His generosity required admiration. His moral convictions frequently concealed a desire to feel superior to the people around him.

Witnessing the woman’s death does not make him bad. It makes him visible to himself for the first time. And what we see is not a monster, but something much harder to dismiss: an ordinary person who had very good reasons for everything he did and who, in a single unwitnessed moment, did nothing.

Clamence is not a cautionary tale about a particular kind of person, but about a particular kind of belief that being on the right side of an argument, holding the moral high ground, and performing the appropriate concern is the same thing as truly being compassionate.

Here is where Camus takes it further.

What begins in one person — the gap between self-image and behavior, the stories we tell ourselves to keep both intact — does not stay in one person; it becomes the architecture of the systems that people build, inhabit, and defend.

A system that operates from innocence does not announce itself as harmful. It is staffed by people who believe in what they are doing. It has language for everything: necessity, security, order, the greater good, and difficult but responsible decisions.

When Camus has Clamence refer to “our Hitlerian brethren”, the phrase shocks because it refuses to place atrocity outside of humanity. It insists on the ordinary. It says: the horrors of the twentieth century were not produced by a separate species. They were produced by people inside systems that had very convincing reasons for what they were doing, and who, inside those systems, considered themselves decent.

“I admire that diligence, that methodical patience,” Clamence says, mimicking the language of bureaucracy. “When one has no character, one has to apply a method.”

The horror is not only the violence. It is the ease with which language transforms violence into routine administration.

My parents escaped that war believing, with good reason, that the other side was evil. Reading both authors, I understood why, and why that certainty was also the most human and most dangerous thing about it.

Both sides had their reasons. Both sides had their language that made what they were doing sound like protection, liberation, justice, necessity. Both sides were certain, at the level of genuine belief, that they were the ones trying to prevent harm rather than cause it.

And both sides committed atrocities.

Reason did not prevent atrocities, but made them possible. Because once we are certain of our righteousness, we stop being able to see clearly what we are doing.

Belief in our own innocence removes the need to look.

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I recognize the same structure in what is happening around me today. Each side with its language. Each side with its reasons. The same certainty, different words. We want simplicity when things are so tangled—I know I instinctively do. But complication is also one of the easiest places for our conscience to hide.

Both Dostoevsky and Camus arrive at the same place from different directions. Dostoevsky shows us what it looks like from the outside: a society that performs goodness while consuming Nastasya’s destruction. Camus shows us what it looks like from the inside: a man who slowly realizes that his goodness was always partly a story he needed to tell himself.

Together, they are asking one question.

Not: am I a good person?
But: what story am I telling myself right now that makes it impossible to see when I'm not?

The most dangerous person is not the one who knows they are cruel.

The most dangerous person is the one who is certain they are not. The one who has so thoroughly convinced themselves of their own decency that harm can pass through their hands and never register as harm at all.

I have been that person, in smaller ways. I suspect most of us have. Growing up, I truly believed that one side of the war my parents escaped was right and the other was wrong. Reading The Idiot and The Fall, I recognized the same structure inside myself — smaller, quieter, but the same. How much of my generosity did I want to be witnessed? How much of my compassion required an audience?

The question is not whether we are capable of causing harm while believing we aren't. We are. The question is whether we are willing to keep asking, even when—especially when—the answer would disturb the story we need to believe about ourselves.

The self-deception Camus describes is not a character flaw that belongs to certain people. It is a feature of being human: the way the mind protects its own coherence, the way identity requires a story that is at least partially flattering. We are all, to some degree, the unreliable narrators of our own goodness.

What I do know is that the people on both sides of the civil war were not, in the main, unusual people. They were parents and neighbors and teachers and ordinary members of ordinary communities who had, somewhere along the way, been given language that reclassified what they were doing: who had a system, and reasons, and the deep comfort of being certain they were on the right side.

But discomfort is not a threat to goodness. Perhaps, it is what makes goodness possible.

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For most of my life, I have been a collection of masks. Not dishonest ones — just the kind you build when the full version of you keeps being unsafe to show. I learned early that the self that exists in relation to others is the most dangerous self to have.

The cost of that protection is a particular kind of loneliness. Not the loneliness of being alone. The loneliness of being surrounded by people who know you and still do not know you.

And then, occasionally, someone gets through. What I feel is not just love. It’s terror. The line between I see you and don’t leave is narrower than anyone tells you. I watched what happens when you fall off that line. I watched it happen to my parents.

Emily Brontë gave me the language to understand it.

Catherine Earnshaw understood this tightrope. When she speaks to her housekeeper, Nelly, in Wuthering Heights, she doesn’t describe love as a feeling. She describes it as existence:

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? [...] If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”

This is not a declaration of romance. It is a claim about the nature of the self. Catherine is saying: I am not fully inside me.

Brontë is asserting something radical: that human identity is relationally constituted, that meaning is not purely internal but partly exists outside the individual, in connection with others. If meaning is inside me, I control it. If meaning is another person, I don’t.

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There is developmental evidence for this. From infancy, identity is formed through the eyes that look back at us. A child learns they exist because someone responds to their cry. They learn they are lovable because someone loved them. We are, in a profound sense, mirrored into existence — we know we matter not because we decided it, but because someone told us so with their presence.

Loneliness hurts because it deprives us of those mirrors. When no one responds, when no one acknowledges you, the self begins to fall inward. That falling is what loneliness actually is.

And this is precisely the fate society bestows on Catherine and Heathcliff. It is not that their love is irrational or disordered. It is that society makes it unbelievable and unlivable.

Heathcliff is brutalized by Hindley, stripped of status, dismissed as a class inferior — and this is not incidental to the story; it is the story. In Wuthering Heights, class and race are the mechanisms by which society enforces who is allowed to be loved and who must learn to want something else.

Catherine is trained to understand that her deepest bond is incompatible with her survival. She must choose Linton — not because she loves him more, but because the world has told her that her real self is unacceptable.

“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

One interpretation of this famous speech is that Catherine is describing obsession. But I don’t think that’s the case.

It is ontological recognition — the experience of being seen all the way down. There is something beautiful in that. To be known at that depth is the rarest thing.

Which is exactly why what follows cuts so deep. The depth of the recognition is the depth of the wound.

She buries the need — marries Linton, performs the acceptable life — but the need does not disappear. Suppressed identity never truly disappears. The mask she wears, the self-denial of a part of her soul, erodes her very being, literally sucking the life from her until she dies.

That is one fate of the denied need: turned inward, it consumes the self. Turned outward, it consumes everyone within reach. And that is Heathcliff’s story.

When a fundamental need is external and perpetually denied, love curdles. The progression is almost mechanical: I love you becomes I need you becomes I cannot exist without you becomes I cannot lose you, which, finally and tragically, becomes I must control you. Love fuses with panic. The threat is not heartbreak but annihilation. How do you secure something essential to your survival that is fundamentally uncontrollable?

You can’t.

Fear makes you try. And that’s when we fall off the tightrope.

This is the tragedy Brontë is charting. Heathcliff’s violence and Catherine’s self-erasure are two expressions of the same wound. Possession does not emerge from a desire to dominate. It emerges from the impossibility of trust when trust has never been made safe. The attempt to make what is inherently ephemeral permanent — to contain love, to fix it, to hold it still — is not inherently evil. It is what deprivation does to need.

None of this absolves Heathcliff. He torments the innocent, ruins two families, and grinds a child into an instrument of revenge. The wound explains him. It does not excuse him. Both things are true, and the novel refuses to let us pick one.

Love and selfhood become entangled here in ways that are both beautiful and terrible: the recognition is genuine, the bond is real, and it is precisely that reality that makes its mutation so devastating.

These patterns do not begin with Heathcliff. They are handed down. What Hindley did to Heathcliff was shaped by his own grief and entitlement. What Catherine learned about love was taught to her by a world that treated class as worth and tenderness as weakness.

Society is not a backdrop. It is inheritance. And emotional legacy is what it leaves in the body long after the original wound has healed over. We are not only formed by what happens to us — we are forged by what happened to those who formed us.

I watched my parents fall off the tightrope. I am still learning which of my masks were mine and which were theirs.

Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, offers what might be the novel’s hidden thesis:

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

For Catherine, this is literal. She dreams of being cast out of heaven, and wakes weeping with relief to find herself on the heath:

“Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

Heaven is hell. Wuthering Heights — storm, cold, class violence, the site of everything that destroyed her — is the only place she has ever been fully known. That is what Brontë is asking us to sit with: that love is recognition. And recognition, when it has been denied long enough, becomes the most dangerous thing in the world.

I don’t know how you love safely when safety was never part of the learning. I don’t know how you hold someone without that hold becoming a grip. I don’t know how you stop treating the rare experience of being seen as something that must be protected at any cost.

Maybe that’s the question Brontë is really asking. Not whether Heathcliff is a monster. Not whether Catherine was foolish. But the cost of being seen.

The moment we take off the mask, we hand someone a part of ourselves and with it, the power to unmake us.

This is the trade Brontë describes in Catherine’s famous speech: to be truly known is to exist, partly, in someone else's keeping. Which means losing them is not like losing anything else. It is losing a piece of yourself that you cannot get back, because you no longer hold it.

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Catherine told us this from the beginning — I am not fully inside me. So when the world denied her Heathcliff, it did not deny her a companion; it denied her access to her own soul. That is why she dies. Not of heartbreak. Of amputation. And Heathcliff, left holding a piece of her with nowhere to put it, shows us the other way that wound can go.

That is the tightrope: between the loneliness of the mask and the danger of the face beneath it. I am still walking it. I suspect everyone is.

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(trigger warning: there is mention of suicide in this article)

My last essay ended on a somewhat bleak conclusion: that the world does not nurture goodness, but destroys it.

By the end of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin—the novel’s embodiment of compassion and moral openness—is psychologically broken. The world does not merely fail him; it crushes him.

So where do we go from there?

After a period in my own life that left me convinced goodness had no real place in this world—that exploitation, cruelty, and power were what truly survived—I found myself reading The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel by Albert Camus.

Camus begins with a deceptively simple question: if life has no inherent meaning, why don’t we kill ourselves?

For Camus, the Absurd emerges from the collision between two realities: humanity’s desperate search for meaning and the universe’s silence in response. We long for order, justice, and purpose. Yet the universe offers none of these things inherently. Too often, we see cruelty rewarded, goodness punished, softness crushed, and justice denied. We believe, deep down, that justice should prevail and that love should be met with love.

But both Camus and Dostoyevsky recognized that the world offers no such guarantees.

And if that's true—if we can love deeply, act kindly, and endure suffering while those who inflict cruelty often seem to prosper; if there is no inherent meaning or justice in what we do—then why go on living at all?

The follow-up question, which he explores in The Rebel, is even more unsettling: if life has no objective meaning, why not commit murder? Why not simply pursue power, pleasure, or domination to get what we want?

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This is where Camus becomes deeply relevant to Dostoevsky.

I am not a philosopher, so I will not attempt a rigorous definition of nihilism.

But emotionally, nihilism feels like standing at the edge of an abyss and discovering that nothing is waiting to catch you. It is the terror of realizing that suffering may be random, that goodness offers no protection, and that pain, loss, and death come for us all regardless of how deeply we love or how well we live. The beliefs that once gave shape to our lives—justice, meaning, morality—begin to crumble beneath our feet.

In The Idiot, the character who most embodies this terror is Ippolit.

Ippolit belongs to a lineage of characters “cursed with consciousness”: Hamlet, the Underground Man, Camus’s absurd man. He sees too clearly. He cannot shield himself with comforting illusions. Dying slowly of tuberculosis, he is consumed not only by physical suffering, but by the unbearable realization that his death will mean nothing. It will not be heroic. It will not even be memorable.

His anguish mirrors the novel’s recurring discussion of Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb.

When Myshkin sees the painting, he remarks that it is enough to make “one lose their faith.” And it is easy to understand why. Holbein depicts Christ not as transcendent or divine, but as brutally, horrifyingly dead. The body is already decaying. There is no beauty in it. No visible promise of resurrection.

Only matter.

Only mortality.

The painting strips death of spiritual symbolism and forces us to confront its physical reality.

And death is physical.

I have seen people dying. I have watched people die. There is nothing beautiful about it. Nothing poetic. We romanticize death because the alternative is terrifying.

This was the presentment of a poor mangled body which had evidently suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers and people, and of the bitterness of the moment when He had fallen with the cross—all this combined with the anguish of the actual crucifixion.

The face was depicted as though still suffering; as though the body, only just dead, was still almost quivering with agony. The picture was one of pure nature, for the face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer, after such anguish[…] - The Idiot

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argues that much of human civilization is built upon our attempt to escape the terror of mortality. We seek immortality through nations, religion, achievement, power, legacy, and even love. We want desperately to believe our lives matter in some enduring way.

And when people cannot find meaning, they often reach for domination instead.

This is part of what makes Ippolit so tragic. He lashes out at others—sometimes cruelly, even at Myshkin, the person who shows him the most compassion. But his cruelty comes from despair. Why should goodness matter in a universe that arbitrarily condemns him to die young while others continue living thoughtlessly around him?

Yet beneath his cruelty lies something more vulnerable: the desperate desire to be loved, remembered, witnessed.

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His failed suicide attempt is revealing precisely because it fails. It is less a genuine desire for death than a cry for recognition. He wants someone to see his suffering and declare that it mattered. Most people mock him for this. Myshkin alone understands the profound loneliness underneath it.

Camus argues that even in an absurd universe, human beings can create meaning through rebellion, solidarity, and conscious living. His famous conclusion—“one must imagine Sisyphus happy”—is not optimism, but defiance.

In The Rebel, Camus extends this idea further. If the universe offers no transcendent moral law, then human beings become responsible for one another. Our shared suffering becomes the foundation for solidarity.

What is a rebel? A man who says no - Albert Camus, The Rebel

And yet Dostoevsky remains devastatingly perceptive about the world we actually inhabit. Again and again, he suggests that cruelty often succeeds. Power triumphs over goodness. Compassion is exploited. The vulnerable are destroyed.

The truth is that human beings cannot fully trust one another.

The tragedy is that we cannot survive without each other.

Perhaps that is the truth both Dostoevsky and Albert Camus circle toward, even if they arrive there differently: not that goodness always wins—it often does not—but that in a world stripped of certainty, choosing humanity anyway may be the only meaning we can create.

This, I think, is what Dostoevsky means by beauty.

The contrast between Myshkin, Ippolit, and Nastasya reveals that Dostoyevsky rejects simplistic ideas about suffering. Suffering does not automatically sanctify people, but neither does it inherently corrupt them. Instead, suffering reveals character without fully determining it.

Ippolit responds to suffering with bitterness and cruelty. Nastasya lashes out because she has been so profoundly violated by the world that destruction becomes inseparable from love. And then there is Myshkin, who spends the novel struggling to remain compassionate in a society that treats compassion itself as weakness.

That struggle—not innocence—is what makes him beautiful.

Dostoevsky never romanticizes suffering. Suffering destroys people constantly in this novel. It destroys Ippolit. It destroys Nastasya. In the end, it destroys Myshkin too. Compassion is not rewarded with triumph or safety. If anything, goodness leaves people more vulnerable to the brutality of the world.

And yet Dostoevsky still insists upon its necessity.

For Camus, compassion is not merely moral idealism; it is part of the human condition itself. Human beings need one another as fundamentally as they need food, water, and air. The alternative to solidarity is domination, and domination eventually consumes everything around it.

When the rebel says “no,” they are doing more than rejecting their own oppression. They are declaring that there exists a limit beyond which no human being should be pushed. In recognizing that limit, they discover solidarity with others, because the dignity they claim for themselves must also belong to everyone else.

“I rebel—therefore we exist.” - The Rebel

Camus ultimately argues that just like we must create meaning in a world with none, we must choose compassion in a world that does not reward it.

Dostoyevsky’s tragic complement is this: that this choice may be nearly impossible, and yet remains necessary anyway.

Near the end of The Idiot, the novel asks whether beauty can save the world.

Perhaps Dostoyevsky’s answer is not that beauty will save the world, but that it is the only thing that ever could.

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(Trigger warning: There is discussion of depression in this article)

“I don’t have a right to express my thoughts” - Prince Myshkin, The Idiot

This one line reveals how deeply wounded Myshkin truly is. For all the compassion, grace, and understanding he offers others, he struggles to believe his own voice deserves space in the world.

What must happen to someone for them to think they have no right to express their thoughts?

Humiliation.

Degradation.

Repeated assertions that you do not deserve to take up space; your very existence is mocked. Because if something is said often enough, it becomes reality, doesn’t it?

Is that not trauma?

Peeling away the layers of someone until they cease to exist at all. Turning identity into nothingness.

It is hard when the people who see all of you reject you.

Hard isn’t the right word.

Crushing. Devastating. An erasure of existence.

Humiliation takes its toll even on Myshkin, who, in nearly every social interaction, is mocked as an idiot, even by those who supposedly love him, like Aglaya.

“He had a premonition that if he remained here a few days more, he would be drawn into the world irrevocably” - The Idiot

The man who recognizes the soul behind the mask, who tries to form true, genuine bonds, wants to sever them all and return to his sanatorium in Switzerland. But he does not, because he believes that would be cowardly.

And so slowly, pieces of him are chipped away.

To me, the Prince’s thoughts reflect deep depression. Depression can be thought of as staring into the abyss, trying to reconcile what the world could be with what it is. It is a darkness, a pain so deep, so all-consuming, born from the understanding that compassion is crucial for life and yet is not promised.

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Myshkin’s moment of darkness, when he wants to disappear from the world entirely, stems from a realization that he can give the world his heart and receive nothing in return.

The Prince’s desire to be alone reveals that society is breaking him. People withdraw when their bodies learn that solitude is safer than connection, when every attempt at closeness has taught our nervous system to expect pain.

Depression is profoundly isolating because it convinces you that you are fundamentally alone. Worse, it persuades you that being alone is preferable because life has offered so little evidence of safety, understanding, or belonging that withdrawal begins to feel like the only rational choice.

But being human is a terrifying thing to do alone.

We like to believe that love will be met with love, but Dostoevsky raises the terrifying possibility that this isn’t true.

Myshkin wishes to be “forgotten, forgotten here entirely.”

When he says this aloud, everyone in the group laughs at him, and he joins in on the laughter.

While Myshkin sees the soul behind the pain, no one seems to see his suffering behind the mask.

All they see is an idiot.

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I think many sensitive people learn the same lessons early:

Softness attracts cruelty.

Vulnerability invites humiliation.

Sensitivity appears maladaptive for living.

For this reason, reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky felt intensely personal, like I was watching someone articulate a grief I have carried my entire life.

At its core, the novel poses a terrifying question: Can genuine goodness survive ordinary human society?

To explore this question, Dostoevsky introduces Prince Myshkin, a man so sincere and compassionate that he seems absurd to those around him. Having spent much of his life isolated in a sanatorium in Switzerland because of his epilepsy, Myshkin enters Russian aristocratic society almost completely unvarnished. He does not understand the social performances everyone else instinctively participates in.

He treats servants and aristocrats alike with equal dignity. He responds to suffering rather than status. He speaks openly when everyone else is maneuvering strategically.

In other words, he behaves as though compassion matters more than power.

Very early in the novel, he speaks casually and kindly with a household valet, who is completely thrown off by this and feels that the prince’s behavior is “inappropriate”. Because Russian aristocratic society depended upon a rigid hierarchy, servants were expected to remain functional and invisible. But Myshkin speaks to the valet as though they are simply two human beings talking to one another. The valet is unsettled by this. Though the valet liked the prince in his “own way”, Myshkin also aroused in him “pronounced and gross indignation.”

Why?

Myshkin treats everyone equally because he sees the individual soul behind the facade, unintentionally tearing apart the social script. The valet expects superiority or condescension but instead receives equality, attention, and sincerity.

This pattern repeats throughout the novel. Myshkin’s goodness does not comfort society. It threatens it.

When he recounts witnessing an execution by guillotine, everyone else speaks about the execution abstractly, discussing whether the guillotine is humane because death occurs quickly. But Myshkin fixates not on the mechanics of death, but on the unbearable psychological torment of the condemned man waiting to die.

He refuses abstraction. He refuses to reduce a person to a criminal, a political issue, or a social necessity. By seeing the soul inside the suffering body, he makes others in the room deeply uncomfortable, probably because they did not.

Later in the novel, before Myshkin is introduced to high society at a formal dinner in honor of his presumed engagement to Aglaya, Aglaya specifically asks him not to talk of “foolish” things like executions. During the dinner itself, while others operate through wit, performance, status games, and social maneuvering, Myshkin alone sees friendship, connection, and people “born together”. When he speaks from sincere moral feeling, the atmosphere immediately becomes strained. People repeatedly try to restrain him, interrupt him, redirect him, and sit him down.

And I think Dostoevsky understood something profound here: Sincerity in a cynical environment can feel like an accusation. Not because the sincere person intends harm, but because genuine compassion exposes how much of ordinary social life depends upon performance, hierarchy, vanity, and emotional self-protection.

This is part of why Myshkin fascinates me so deeply. Dostoevsky crafted him to embody the idea that “compassion is the principal and perhaps the only law of existence for all mankind.” He moves through the world as though human beings should actually care for one another, not merely perform care in accordance with social expectations.

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What makes his presence so disruptive is that he reveals an absence no one realized existed. Those around him do not consider themselves cold or unkind; they genuinely believe they care for one another and see themselves as “good” because they have fulfilled society’s expectations of what “goodness” looks like. We see this most clearly with the Yepanchin family, who are middle-class, respectable, and generally considered “good” (especially compared to the “disreputable” Nastasiya).

Yet Myshkin’s radical compassion creates a kind of negative space around him, illuminating the difference between affection shaped by pride, obligation, or self-interest and compassion that asks for nothing in return.

Only when they encounter Myshkin do the various characters begin to realize what has been absent from their lives. His kindness and sensitivity force them into an uncomfortable confrontation with themselves, exposing the hollowness of their relationships and how much of their perceived “goodness” is governed by status, fear, possession, transaction, and pride rather than genuine concern for another person.

He exposes the compromises, the masks, and the carefully maintained hierarchies society depends on to function.

And this destabilizes the world around him.

The novel is a constant struggle between society and Myshkin, while the reader waits to see who will break first.

Myshkin sees through the totems people use to separate themselves from one another—class, status, reputation, power—and instead recognizes the frightened and suffering human being beneath them. He understands that this vulnerability is the one thing all of us truly share.

Because society is not built around the kind of radical compassion Myshkin embodies, his goodness does not merely destabilize social structures but actively destroys those around him.

This is what makes The Idiot such a painful novel.

Myshkin’s compassion entangles him in suffering he cannot resolve. He absorbs the pain of everyone around him, yet his attempts to help often deepen the very tragedies he wishes to prevent: Nastasiya dies at the hand of Rogozhin; Myshkin breaks Aglaya’s heart, leaving her estranged from her once tight-knit family.

Dostoevsky places Myshkin’s belief that “beauty will save the world” at the heart of his relationship with Nastasya Filippova. While most people see her either as an object of desire or as a “fallen woman”, and Myshkin alone recognizes the trauma beneath her self-destruction and shame.

He responds with compassion she has never experienced before and therefore cannot fully understand. Yet this recognition does not save her; if anything, it deepens her torment. As a result, she oscillates between Myshkin and Rogozhin, drawn toward the possibility of love and redemption while remaining convinced that she is unworthy of it. The world—her abuser, the respectable members of society who condoned the abuse, and even the “decent” Yepanchins—has taught her to see herself as ruined and unworthy, and so Myshkin’s love appears not as miraculous but impossible, an illusion born of innocence or delusion.

Unable to believe in the vision of herself that Myshkin offers, she ultimately chooses the path that is familiar. She throws herself into Rogozhin’s arms, knowing that death awaits her there because, at some level, she believes that is what she deserves.

And he kills her.

This is the devastating paradox at the heart of the novel: goodness is morally powerful but socially powerless.

We need genuine recognition. We need to be seen. But such love and kindness may have no place in the world humans have constructed for themselves. Dostoevsky seems to suggest that society itself is fundamentally incompatible with true compassion. Human systems reward power, performance, manipulation, emotional hardness, and hierarchy far more reliably than they reward goodness. And yet the novel offers no comforting alternative. The world continues almost unchanged after Myshkin collapses. Dostoevsky even notes at the end that many of the characters “have changed little.”

Perhaps that is why The Idiot affected me so deeply. It articulated something I think many sensitive people discover early in life: that kindness often comes with consequences, that sincerity can make others uncomfortable, that softness can become a liability in systems organized around power.

It’s a difficult question to answer. If goodness is justified by success, then the answer is no.

By any conventional measure, it failed.

He does not save Nastasya. He does not reform society. He does not even save himself. Every single character who tries to break from the social mold is ruined, broken, or dead. The characters who survive (and even thrive) at the end are the ones who maintained their distance from the sort of love Myshkin embodied.

But Dostoevsky does spend 700+ pages showing us someone who refuses to become cruel in a cruel world.

Perhaps that is the question he leaves us with.

Do we still choose kindness when there is no guarantee it will save anyone? Do we still choose compassion when it may leave us wounded, misunderstood, or broken? Do we still love one another despite the certainty of suffering?

(Thoughts continued in part 2)

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(I am really bad at social media, so you may notice my welcome post is coming after my other posts…)

I’ve always used stories to understand how to live.

Not simply to escape, but to make sense of the world: why people hurt each other, why love transforms us, why power corrupts, why some wounds never fully heal.

This space is part reading journal, part literary blog, and part quiet corner for people who want to engage more deeply with books, storytelling, and the strange, beautiful experience of being human.

Having struggled with mental health, I’m especially drawn to stories about:

• tenderness in violent worlds

• rage and survival

• power and corruption

• longing, devotion, and grief

• outsiders who cannot fully belong

Here you’ll find essays, reflections, reading notes, and personal thoughts inspired by all types of fiction: literature, fantasy, mythology, romance, and the emotional truths fiction reveals about real life.

I don’t really post traditional reviews but rather thoughts/essays on resonance:
the passages that linger,
the characters who unsettle us,
the stories that quietly alter the way we see ourselves and each other.

I’m also an aspiring fantasy author currently working on an adult epic fantasy novel centered on trauma, power, prophecy, love, and the monstrous things we become to survive.

More than anything, I hope this becomes a thoughtful and welcoming space for people who want to slow down, reflect, and connect through stories — not just as consumers of books, but as people trying to better understand ourselves, each other, and the world we live in.

If you’ve ever felt changed by a book, haunted by a passage, or comforted by a story at exactly the right moment, then you are very welcome here.