*** Content note: This article discusses sexual assault, trauma responses, and the harm of being silenced or denied support. Please read at your own pace and step away whenever you need to. This past weekend, the story of Jane Doe and the seven Cornell University fraternity members she has accused of rape followed me from one Facebook post to the next, bringing with it a distress that remained long after I put down the screen. According to her civil complaint, the twenty-year-old student was...

When pain lasts only a few days, the most obvious door is often the right one to open: take an analgesic, if necessary, rest, and give the body time to recover. Medication is well suited to that purpose. The difficulty begins when pain ceases to be a passing event and becomes an enduring condition, recurring over weeks, months, or years until it is woven into the ordinary fabric of a person’s life. At that point, pharmacological relief assumes a different role, although the implications of...

At some point, taking responsibility for one’s own life requires more than just making decisions. It requires becoming willing to question some of the assumptions from which those decisions are supposed to follow, usually in circumstances far more ordinary than the language of independence would suggest. I ask a second question because the first answer does not make sense, read the information for myself rather than relying entirely on someone else’s interpretation of it, want to know what...