We are not always home, nor always gone. Some of the most important moments in our lives happen in the hallway.

This is the strange territory of liminal space—not here, not there, but between. You’ve been here before. Maybe you didn’t have a name for it, but you felt it in your bones.

It’s the airport at 3 a.m., the months between the diagnosis and the treatment plan, the awkward first weeks after a breakup when the bed feels too big and the world too small.

Liminal space is the threshold. It is the place where identity is unstitched, reality destabilized, and the old rules no longer apply.

Victor Turner (1969) wrote of it as a “betwixt and between” zone, where the self is disassembled in preparation for reassembly. There is no furniture in this room. You are not supposed to get comfortable. You are meant to pass through, not unpack.

But not all in-between spaces are empty or disorienting.

Some are richly furnished with contradiction, stocked with the tools of synthesis. These are third spaces—and they don’t ask you to choose between here or there. They invite you to sit at the table and make something new.

Let’s begin with a confession. I have five years of freeze-dried fand canned food in my larder.

It’s stacked neatly in labeled buckets, stored beneath my doonstead om a foggy hill somewhere proximic to the Berkshire Mountains.

Or as we say around here, the Nerkshires, which is how people pronounce it once they’ve been up there too long, wearing Carhartt bibs and whispering to their generators.

I didn’t mean to become a prepper.
I was just anxious. And paying attention.

And trying to do something—anything—that made me feel like I could keep my loved ones fed if everything fell apart.

Which brings us to a strange modern truth:

The pantry is no longer just a pantry. It’s a coping mechanism.

Costco is a funny place to find your center.
It smells like rotisserie chicken, looks like an aircraft hangar, and feels—if we’re honest—a little bit like home.

You walk in, flash your card like a passport, and step into a world where everything is big, cold, and comfortingly the same. Somewhere between the 36-roll toilet paper and the industrial muffins, it hits you:

“I feel okay here.”

You are not alone. In a time of runaway prices, family fragility, and a fragile supply chain that seems one shipping delay away from apocalypse, Costco has become more than a store.

It’s become a ritual. A balm. A bunker. A place where you can both stock up and exhale.

This guide is for those who feel that hum.

Who sense that the weekly Costco run might be doing something deeper than restocking the pantry.

And for anyone who suspects that the free sample of sausage on a toothpick might be the closest thing they’ve had to communion in a while.

The Mall Is Dead. Long Live the Mall.

This is not just a story about retail. It’s about us.

Our dreams, our loneliness, our bad haircuts and ill-fitting Aeropostale hoodies.

It’s about a building that pretended to be a town square and a culture that pretended to be a family.

The American mall wasn’t just a place you went.
It was a place you performed—your identity, your class, your hunger.

And now it’s a corpse.

Or is it?

What Are Aura Points?

In the post-pandemic swirl of wellness culture, emotional labor fatigue, and spiritual rebranding, a curious meme quietly ascended: Aura Points.

They're not real—yet everyone online seems to be gaining or losing them.

Aura points are a symbolic currency for vibes-based virtue.

They measure not just what you do, but how subtly and spiritually you do it.

You don't just recycle—you reflect on the intergenerational trauma of consumption while recycling, and preferably post it with gentle lo-fi music playing in the background.

Welcome to Aura Capitalism: where worth is earned in silence, curated in aesthetics, and spent on social approval.

There are people whose sadness is not a scream but a hum.

Who organize their lives like a spreadsheet but walk through each day as if they’ve just read the last page of a tragic novel.

They are thoughtful, conscientious, productive—and permanently bruised somewhere inside.

Welcome to the world of the Functional Melancholic.

Not a psychiatric label. Not a trending TikTok term. Just a lived reality for more people than you'd guess.

What Does It Mean to Be Functional and Melancholic?

Your partner slams the fridge, muttering under their breath.

You look up from the couch and whisper gently:
“Okay, Bombardino Crocodilo, let’s not summon Tralalero Tralala over oat milk again.”

They snort. You both laugh. Conflict de-escalated. Affection restored. Therapy avoided—for today.

Welcome to Italian Brainrot: the nonsensical, AI-born meme that has become a wildly effective emotional lubricant in modern relationships, especially for younger and neurodiverse couples.

What began as surreal internet humor now functions like a relational toolkit dressed up in spaghetti-sauce chaos.

It’s stupid. It’s brilliant. It’s working.

What Is Italian Brainrot?

Some couples tell their love story at weddings.

Others tell theirs in therapy, right after saying something like, “I don’t know why I can’t leave. It’s like we’re addicted to each other.”

That’s not romance. That’s trauma reenactment dressed up as chemistry.

One of the most volatile and heartbreakingly common toxic relationship patterns is the pairing of a person with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) traits and a partner with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) traits.

On social media, it’s described in hashtags like #traumabond or #clusterbhell. In the therapy room, we call it a relational crucible—and sometimes, the beginning of actual healing.

But first, let’s unpack how this dynamic works.

When two people marry, they usually don’t expect a third partner in the relationship. But in medical marriages, that third partner is often the job itself—ever present, ever hungry, and occasionally more demanding than either person involved.

Medicine is a calling. It's also a system. A culture.

A way of being that seeps into your bones and, sometimes, into your bed.

For many medical couples, especially those in long-term marriages, the real struggle isn’t about communication or chores—it’s about how to stay connected when your whole nervous system has been trained to disconnect.

And that’s not a character flaw. It’s a consequence of the work.

There was a time, not long ago, when porn came in the form of a VHS tape hidden inside a cereal box in your uncle’s garage.

Erotic curiosity meant faded Playboy magazines, elbowy make-outs, and the persistent question: Is this how it’s supposed to feel?

Now, with the miracle of generative AI, you can summon your ideal sex partner like a horny sorcerer: “Alexa, make her taller, sadder, and emotionally available.”

And lo—she appears.

The Archives of Sexual Behavior recently chronicled this brave new world: 36 platforms offering build-a-lover technology that allows you to control everything from eye color to emotional neediness.

Want a sultry goth redhead girlfriend with a 1960’s haircut with bangs who talks like an audiobook narrator and hates your ex?

Done.

Prefer a cowboy with a PhD in philosophy and a submissive streak?

Also done. Just click, prompt, unzip, repeat.

This isn’t "porn." It’s erotic UX design. You’re not aroused—you’re A/B testing orgasms.

Misophonia is not simply “being annoyed” at sounds.
Autism is not simply “thinking differently.”
And when you combine them, you don’t just get “quirky.”

You get a relationship to sound that can feel like living inside a siege.

The connection between misophonia and autism isn't a coincidence. It’s a shared language of sensory processing—a nervous system that reacts to sounds the way most people react to a fire alarm or an oncoming car: fight, flight, or freeze.

And yet, both in research and popular imagination, we have treated misophonia as a psychological oddity, and autism as a social disability.

We have not, until recently, taken seriously the idea that sound sensitivity itself might be a kind of emotional and neurological trauma in slow motion.

Once upon a time — and by "once" I mean approximately the mid-2010s — we were all but commanded to turn ourselves inside out for public consumption.

Overshare! Trauma dump! Be "authentic" until you emotionally flatline. It was, frankly, a little grotesque.

Now, in a world groaning under the weight of too much information, a quieter rebellion is underway: emotional minimalism.

Think Marie Kondo for your feelings. If it doesn't spark mutual respect, you thank it for its service and leave it at the curb.

What Is Emotional Minimalism?