https://twitter.com/msmacb/status/1424924316525744130

https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a36843667/melissa-febos-proposal-relationship-essay/

Although we had been speaking of love since the beginning, we agreed not to talk about “forever.” We both knew that people changed—we were people interested in changing, and we cared more about being honest with each other and ourselves than in the fleeting thrill of grand proclamations that had contradictory track records.

https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/mind-fuck-writing-better-sex

The project of that experience is something I can describe so succinctly only on the other side of having written a book about it and with nearly twenty years of hindsight. At that time, my own motives were not yet clear to me, nor were the distinctions between my own desires and those coming from outside me, or my internalization of them, or the story I had cursorily written to paper over those realities. In this case, the flimsy story was that I had simply recognized a lucrative opportunity. That commercial BDSM was an inherently feminist enterprise. That being on drugs prevented anything from making an impression on me. That I didn’t feel anything but bored, empowered, and high. None of this was true. The experience was not all that well paying, was often humiliating, and I was often aroused, ashamed, confused, scared, exhilarated, and bored even while high on drugs, not to mention the oubliette of my truer feelings to which I did not yet have access. This kind of psychological, imaginative, and ultimately aesthetic slumber can be entertaining, particularly if your own thoughts about sex are uninterrogated, but the more my own consciousness wakes, the more boring I find it. My mother has been a practicing clinical psychotherapist herself for over twenty-five years. Once, I asked her if she ever gets sleepy during sessions. “Rarely,” she said, and explained that, for the most part, she finds listening to her patients inexhaustibly compelling. Over the years, she has come to understand that the only time she gets drowsy is when her patient isn’t telling the whole truth, mostly to themselves, or when they are not fully awake in their telling. If they are performing a persona or telling her the story they have told themselves and not reaching for the greater truth of an experience, she begins pinching herself. I related, not as a listener to people’s stories but as a reader of them. There are many beautiful and acclaimed books that I have begun and found astute in any number of ways. However, if such a book strikes me as asleep to its own biases, if it lacks that glint of authorial awareness amid the characters’ self-delusions, my attention drifts. I wish there were a more technical way to describe this recognition, but it is largely the function of experience. I have written work that is dishonest in this way and, in literature as in life, we who have recovered from a thing are often the best detectors of it.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/7239692/nfl-displaced-steelers-fans-found-new-home-houston