painting painting painting sunflowers
I’ve been thinking a little bit obsessively about my last post, wondering if it’s weird to be thinking so much about something I wrote. But it really bothers me that I came off sounding like I care so much about salary and prestige. That is definitely not how I started out as a young person. […]
I heard a piece on the radio yesterday about how experiencing depression as a young adult can have a profound impact on a person’s career outcomes. The story, on NPR’s Marketplace, talks about how the National Institutes of Health estimate that there are 58 million of us in the United States who experience some form […]
With Thanksgiving rushing down upon us, it’s time to fire up the computer, drag out the camera and get everyone dressed up for the photo to go with the holiday letter for friends and family. The imagery around the idea sounds stale, and I think the last time I sat for one of those photos […]
I’ve been reading a recent novel by Margaret Drabble, The Pure Gold Baby, which I didn’t find by searching for novels about mental illness, though I have been reading rather a lot of those, since I want to see what else has been written besides the books I have been writing. I was reading Drabble, […]
It really frustrated me to read that the mass shooting in Texas has been written off quickly by some in our government as a mental health issue. I’ve thought about this a lot in the last day, and I suppose that someone who is abusive to their own family may well have issues that stem […]
I’m going today to have lunch with a group of friends who have connections to the department where I work; most of them used to work there with me. This is the first time that we’re getting together since one of them, let’s call her Ann, finished nursing her ex-husband through pancreatic cancer. We had […]
I’m just back from a few days on the East Coast where I feel like I was posing as someone who knew what they were doing at a large committee meeting. I reassured myself in advance that I didn’t have to do very much besides listen intently, but even that can be really hard in […]
I first heard a long time ago that it’s good for us to laugh. Laughter does not always come easily to me; I think that’s why I love my sons so much. They are two people who can make me laugh when nothing seems funny. Perhaps because we’ve been so close for so long, we […]
I’ve been thinking all day about Vincent Van Gogh and his brother, Theo. Vincent painted such beautiful pictures, and I love his repetitions, the sequences of paintings where he painted the same subject or something like the same subject again and again. Was he experimenting with different techniques? Trying to make the painting better? Making […]
After several weeks of hearing about one disaster after another – the hurricanes in Texas and Puerto Rico and Florida – and now waking for a week and a half to skies full of smoke from fires burning to the north of us, I started to wonder about mental health in a disaster. Not […]
Elisabeth Levien 