Every couple has a version of the same scene.

One partner says, “I think something’s going on,” and the other partner—usually while opening the fridge or scrolling their phone—says, “You’re reading into it.”

If you’re neurodiverse—or partnered with someone who is—this happens more often than you’d like.

And that’s where Cassandra Syndrome shows up: not as a mythic curse, but as a daily mismatch of timing, perception, and emotional bandwidth.

At its core, Cassandra Syndrome is the experience of being right early while your partner is… let’s call it “delightfully, stubbornly unconvinced.”

It’s not pathology.
It’s not drama.

It’s the friction point between different neurotypes, different processing speeds, and different ways of detecting reality.

“California sober” is a modern, coastal-flavored rebrand of partial abstinence: a person stops drinking and avoids the heavier substances but keeps cannabis, psychedelics, or whatever gentler intoxication lets them feel functional without feeling exposed.

It’s not a clinical category.

Not recognized by addiction psychiatry.

It’s a distinctly American compromise—sobriety with loopholes, abstinence in soft focus.

In plain language:
California sober is sobriety with negotiated exceptions.
A spiritual SNAFU dressed in wellness vocabulary.

But beneath the contradiction is something tender: a quiet attempt at self-compassion.

The movement of young men toward the Orthodox Church is not dramatic if you see it up close.

It’s quiet. Nearly invisible. Until you read about it on Drudge.

But it’s still the sort of shift that begins with a feeling someone can’t name, then eventually becomes a choice that surprises even them.

When they try to explain it later—if they explain it at all—they usually mention the chanting, or the icons, or the way the service doesn’t rush itself. But that’s not really what brought them there.

They’re tracking something deeper. Something steady. Something that doesn’t move when the rest of the world does.

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump operated not as anomalies, not as exceptions, but as men whose psychology found the perfect conditions in which to expand.

Each represents a version of Malevolent Narcissism—the subtype marked not by wounded grandiosity but by a purposeful, almost serene entitlement to take whatever they hell they want.

These are men who feel most themselves when others feel smaller. Their power is not relational; it is extractive. And for a time, the culture let them extract freely.

But American culture begins to shift long before the Feed acknowledges it.

The change arrives in small ways—the jokes that no longer land, the public figures we stop defending, the faint but noticeable discomfort when old narratives are repeated.

Before anyone admits that something has altered, the air has already shifted.

Theory of mind is the quiet miracle you don’t notice until it fails.

It’s the human capacity to understand that other people have minds—full interior landscapes with beliefs, emotions, anxieties, and private meanings that differ from your own.

You’d think this would be the most basic human skill. Somehow it’s the rarest.

The term entered the scientific bloodstream when psychologists asked a now-famous question: “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” The answer, as usual, said more about humans than chimpanzees.

We discovered that even humans misunderstand each other constantly—and with appalling confidence.

Theory of mind is not a child’s milestone. It’s an ongoing moral discipline.

Adults may lose it under stress, under shame, and especially under conflict.

Modern life—with its thin signals, algorithmic outrage, and performative certainty—has placed theory of mind on the endangered-cognition list.

Let’s take it from the top, with the full weight of philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, trauma studies, and couples therapy behind it.

There are very few things left in society that can still produce genuine surprise.

Yet every few years, a major newspaper rediscovers—often with biblical awe—that women possess not only an inner life but a sexual one as well.

The latest entry in this recurring cycle is Lucy Denyer’s piece in The Telegraph, in which the revelation that a woman watches pornography is presented with the startled tone usually reserved for rare meteorological phenomena.

The entire article reads like someone has just stumbled upon a secret civilization.

Apparently, women have both desire and internet access. Who knew?

Everyone, of course. Except the Feed.

A covenant marriage is a legally reinforced version of marriage available only in Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas—three states that, with great confidence, decided they could succeed where the rest of the country and half of Europe have failed: telling adults what to do with their relationships.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, couples who choose this model voluntarily give up the option of no-fault divorce in exchange for a contract with mandatory counseling and stricter exit criteria.

It’s marriage with the wheels chocked, the emergency brake pulled, and your pastor holding the spare key.

You sign not just a license but a “declaration of intent,” which is the marital equivalent of announcing to your dinner guests that yes, you really mean it this time—you’re going to stop eating sugar. In theory, it restores gravitas.

In practice, it’s America’s attempt to legislate what used to be enforced by tight-knit communities, extended families, and a general fear of public shame.

We’ve traded those for Bluetooth-enabled doorbells and algorithmic loneliness. Of course something like covenant marriage was going to pop up eventually.

Every generation resurrects the same myth: the gifted child who emerges like Athena from Zeus’s skull — brilliant, fully formed, and above all, untainted by the human mess of family dynamics.

It’s a comforting story. It flatters us.

If brilliance is innate, no one has to grapple with the awkward truth that giftedness isn’t an ethereal trait, but a relational product — the slow accumulation of cognitive patterns, parental habits, emotional climates, and, yes, the parent’s own gloriously imperfect wiring.

A recent study, The Role of Parental Education, Intelligence, and Personality on the Cognitive Abilities of Gifted Children, quietly smashes that myth.

It treats giftedness not as a monolith but as a set of discrete cognitive domains rooted in the Cattell–Horn–Carroll model (McGrew, 2005; Schneider & McGrew, 2018), showing that parents influence different cognitive abilities in different ways.

In other words, giftedness is not one thing — and neither is the parental contribution.

The result is a portrait of gifted children that is richer, more complex, and far more human than the tidy narratives we prefer. Let’s walk through it.

Once upon a time, teenage American boys read books.

And there was once a rite of passage in American male adolescence: reading Henry Miller at precisely the wrong time in life.

When you’re young, his sentences feel like license—wild, rapturous, profane, as if emotional chaos were a sacrament.

Only later, usually after age and regret have taken turns sanding you down, do you realize that Miller wasn’t modeling any sort of depth.

He was modeling the kind of emotional immaturity that flourishes when no one demands your presence.

In this post, I’m not undertaking a cultural cancellation. I hope, instead, that it reads more like a commentary on an American saint of defensive self-absorption.

A diagnosis that doesn’t rewrite your life—It only reveals what you’ve already lived through

At 60, you’re supposed to be gliding into the soft-focus years—gardens, grandkids, and grudges you’ve finally outgrown.

Instead, you’re staring at a late-life diagnosis that clarifies more than it disrupts.

A major meta-analysis in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews confirms that ADHD persists into older adulthood far more reliably than mid-century psychiatry ever allowed, and a national CDC report shows that nearly half of adults with ADHD weren’t diagnosed until adulthood.

The shock isn’t that you “have ADHD.”

The shock is that you lived six decades without anyone naming it.

Every generation invents new words for sex—not because desire is changing, but because we’re finally honest enough to name the patterns we used to pretend were accidents.

The old categories weren’t built for actual humans. They were built for forms, surveys, and the kind of public conversations that depend on polite fictions.

The 2020s have no patience for polite fictions. And that’s how almondsexuality entered the room.

Almondsexual didn’t crawl out of academia or a think tank.

It was born in the digital commons—the LGBTQ+ corners of the internet where people do the real labor of naming their inner lives.

These communities have always been ahead of the curve, inventing vocabulary long before institutions realize their glossary is 40 years out of date.

There are moments in a woman’s life when medicine suddenly remembers she exists.

Menopause isn’t usually one of them.

ADHD in women isn’t either. But put the two together and you enter a research vacuum so deep it makes the Grand Canyon look cramped.

Yet here we are—finally—staring at a study that tries to map what really happens when ADHD and menopause occupy the same hormonal real estate.

It’s messy. It’s counterintuitive. And it tells us more about how women interpret their bodies than anything we’ve learned in decades.

The newest work, published in the Journal of Attention Disorders, forces us to climb out of the cultural fog around “women’s issues” and look directly at what’s been hiding in plain sight.

Women with ADHD aren’t just navigating distractibility—they’re navigating an entire history of being overlooked, misdiagnosed, and expected to tough out biological experiences men receive sympathy medals for.

The fact that it took until 2025 for someone to study this intersection says more about medicine than it does about women.