I want to write about something slightly embarrassing, partly because it is true, and partly because the path out of the belief was, in my case, a particular piece of evidence that I have not, in the years since, ever heard a conspiracy debunker bring up.
I have lived, in adult life, in London, in Sydney, in New York, in Manila, and now in Bangkok.
I want to write about something I have been turning over for the better part of a decade, and that I have not, until now, found a way to articulate clearly enough to put down on paper.
My father has a particular way of being in a room with another person that I have, in the last few years, started to recognize as a kind of fluency the contemporary world no longer has the conditions to teach.
There is a particular kind of grief that some adults arrive at in their forties or fifties, and that almost no one outside of a therapy room is given language for.
I want to write about a particular kind of meal, and a particular kind of person who has, over time, come to prefer it.
My father is getting older, and I have written about him before, in another article, where I tried to describe how much of his late-life contentment seems to come from the long list of things he stopped needing somewhere in his fifties.
It has been more than a decade now since Interstellar came out, and I have, in that time, watched a fair number of the space movies that followed it.
The standard cultural reading of an adult with no close friends tends to assume some form of indifference.
I want to write about my mother's friend G again, because I wrote about her once before in a different article, and what I want to describe today is something I noticed about her last summer that I have been turning over since.
I had dinner last weekend, in a restaurant in central Bangkok, with a man I'll call A, who used to be one of my closest friends.
I sat with my mother in the kitchen of my parents' house in London last Sunday afternoon, and she told me a story I've heard, by my conservative estimate, somewhere between sixty and a hundred times.
I have a sister. I've written about her once before, in a different article, but I want to come back to her here, because there's a specific kind of pain that…
I'm going to write this article carefully, because I'm writing it for an audience that will include people currently in this situation, and I don't want to be either glib or melodramatic about something that, in my experience, breaks people slowly and quietly.
I want to describe a specific moment that happens to me, and to a lot of people I know, at the start of every social event I attend.
I want to tell you about a woman I'll call S, because that wasn't her name, and a relationship that lasted about three years in my early thirties.
