Sickness Support Quotes

It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger.

I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience- one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devistation would by lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.

For the supporters of the Dark Romance Revolution. I adore your black hearts

Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow men. There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are young you should seek for the strength from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day.

AMELIA: Thank you for understanding that life happens and isn’t scripted. Thank you all for understanding that it takes time to write, and sickness doesn’t care what you have planned, or what is going on in your world, it just happens.

It’s hard to feel supported when you can’t tell people everything. People haven’t really got a clue what it’s like. It’s hard to trust anyone. It’s hard to believe people won’t let you down. I’m feeling like I want to cry. My body feels hollow. Empty. I don’t feel like I’m 17. I feel young. I’m not sure how old, maybe about 10 yrs. It’s hard to accept that I can’t get all the support I need from one person. From any person. It’s hard that no one can fully understand. It’s hard for me to admit that inside I feel a really lonely person. What do I need to do to take care of myself right now? Well I need to cuddle my teddies — it sounds silly, but I need some comfort... I was still cuddling teddies when I should have been cuddling boys. The sick imagery in my mind, rather than making me sexually active, had closed that door completely.

The Nazis are not justified by saying, Don't you know that there is more than just the issue of the Jews? The issues are more complex than that! What of the poor in this country, who cannot afford housing? What about the sick and malnourished? Don't you care about these people? Don't you claim to be a follower of Jesus?! Supporting a murderous political agenda with such an argument is tragic! And what do we know about Obama? He is the single most anti-life proponent that has ever run for the office of president.

Besides, if you're sick, I'm on life support. As wrong as that joke is.

When you're sick, who does the shopping or takes you to the doctor? Who do you talk to when you are upset?" In other words, who provides you with emotional and practical support? Some patients gave us surprising answers: "my dog" or "my therapist" – or "nobody".

Along with the trust issues, one of the hardest parts to deal with is the feeling of not being believed or supported, especially by your own grandparents and extended family. When I have been through so much pain and hurt and have to live with the scars every day, I get angry knowing that others think it is all made up or they brush it off because my cousin was a teenager. I was ten when I was first sexually abused by my cousin, and a majority of my relatives have taken the perpetrator's side. I have cried many times about everything and how my relatives gave no support or love to me as a kid when this all came out. Not one relative ever came up to that innocent little girl I was and said "I am sorry for what you went through" or "I am here for you." Instead they said hurtful things: "Oh he was young." "That is what kids do." "It is not like he was some older man you didn't know." Why does age make a difference? It is a sick way of thinking. Sexual abuse is sexual abuse. What is wrong with this picture? It brings tears to my eyes the way my relatives have reacted to this and cannot accept the truth. Denial is where they would rather stay.

When trees grow together, nutrients and water can be optimally divided among them all so that each tree can grow into the best tree it can be. If you "help" individual trees by getting rid of their supposed competition, the remaining trees are bereft. They send messages out to their neighbors in vain, because nothing remains but stumps. Every tree now muddles along on its own, giving rise to great differences in productivity. Some individuals photosynthesize like mad until sugar positively bubbles along their trunk. As a result, they are fit and grow better, but they aren't particularly long-lived. This is because a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it. And there are now a lot of losers in the forest. Weaker members, who would once have been supported by the stronger ones, suddenly fall behind. Whether the reason for their decline is their location and lack of nutrients, a passing malaise, or genetic makeup, they now fall prey to insects and fungi. But isn't that how evolution works? you ask. The survival of the fittest? Their well-being depends on their community, and when the supposedly feeble trees disappear, the others lose as well. When that happens, the forest is no longer a single closed unit. Hot sun and swirling winds can now penetrate to the forest floor and disrupt the moist, cool climate. Even strong trees get sick a lot over the course of their lives. When this happens, they depend on their weaker neighbors for support. If they are no longer there, then all it takes is what would once have been a harmless insect attack to seal the fate even of giants.

Among the gods, there is a dispute as to which one of them originally thought of Christianity; or, as they call it, the Great Leg Pull. Apollo has the best claim, but a sizeable minority support Pluto, ex-God of the Dead, on the grounds that he has a really sick sense of humour. How would it be, suggested the unidentified god, if first we tell them all to love their neighbour, pack in the killing and thieving, and be nice to each other. Then we let them start burning heretics.

What do you do in your spare time?” Arthur asks. What is it with this guy? Hope flinches, feeling less like she’s been interviewed and more like she’s been whiplashed. The spare time question was code for questions, you were, by law, not allowed to ask. Did she read books to sick kids? Find housing for the homeless? Support underprivileged women to build careers? Did she have a demanding husband? Two kids under five? And aging mother? But Hope had never put down stakes, either in the home or the do-good camp. Where she came from, at the end of a workweek, a person deserved a cold beer and some down time. “What spare time?

For everything in my life, I would ask, Why? Why didn't the Chinese lady have teeth? Probably it was because she didn't brush them enough. I asked myself why we had to move to Georgia. It was because my father needed to work at this hatchery so he could support us better. Why did I kind of like that boy? Because he was kind of cute. And why was Lynnie sick? Why? There was no answer to that.

Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect.

Typically, a psychiatrist can fool a patient by telling him the root of his problem can be fixed with this pill, that support group, and more psychiatry appointments. They don't tell the patient that the really fucked up people never get better. They mask their diseases by dousing them in heavy narcotics to numb their sickness, for years, until the peaceful eternal sleep comes and takes them away.

I give you my solemn vow to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, to stand by your side in good times and in bad, to share your joy as well as your sorrow. I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals and dreams, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, to share my hopes and dreams with you, and bring you solace in times of need and to cherish you for as long as we both shall live. - Ana Grey

Thus it is awkward to call motion-sickness a migraine attack, but we may very conveniently term it a migranoid reaction, and note, in support of its affinities, that a large minority (almost 50 per cent, according to Selby and Lance) of adult migraine sufferers experienced severe motion-sickness in

Fever supports the sick man, and love the lover.

If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.

Hope can be foolish or misguided, but there was no such thing as false hope. Hope was always true even when there was no evidence to support its claim.” - Liam

Kylie Major is no longer visible to anyone who supports me and my sister!” I called to the room and Seth flipped his fingers so my voice was amplified ten times over. I caught Darius’s eye and he nodded with a dark glint in his gaze before I continued. “You will not see her, hear her, or even smell the sickly sweet perfume she wears to hide the scent of evil on her,” I spoke clearly, my voice ringing around The Orb and Tory let out a little laugh of triumph. “That goes for anyone who supports the Heirs too,” Seth suddenly boomed and I looked to him with a smile twisting up the corner of my lips. It was dark and savage and tasted new on my mouth. But it felt good to wield our power at long last over someone who deserved it.

Walking away from people we know and love, because of our support for strangers we really don’t know, can barely believe, and definitely don’t love, who FOR SURE won’t be there to drive us to chemo or bring food over when the kids are sick; that is the shadow side of sorting.

We have time for everything: to sleep, to run from one place to another, to regret having mistaken and to mistake again, to judge the others and to forgive ourselves we have time for reading and writing, for making corrections to our texts, to regret ever having written we have time to make plans and time not to respect them, we have time for ambitions and sicknesses, time to blame the destiny and the details, we have time to watch the clouds, advertisements or some ordinary accident, we have time to chase our wonders away and to postpone the answers, we have time to break a dream to pieces and then to reinvent it, we have time to make friends, to lose friends, we have time to receive lessons and forget them afterwards, we have time to receive gifts and not to understand them. We have time for them all. There is no time for just a bit of tenderness. When we are aware about to do this we die. I’ve learned that you cannot make someone love you; All you can do is to be a loved person. the rest … depends on the others. I’ve learned that as much as I care others might not care. I’ve learned that it takes years to earn trust and just a few seconds to lose it. I’ve learned that it does not matter WHAT you have in your life but WHO you have. I’ve learned that your charm is useful for about 15 minutes Afterwards, you should better know something. I’ve learned that no matter how you cut it, everything has two sides! I’ve learned that you should separate from your loved ones with warm words It might be the last time you see them! I’ve learned that you can still continue for a long time after saying you cannot continue anymore I’ve learned that heroes are those who do what they have to do, when they have to do it, regardless the consequences I’ve learned that there are people who love But do not know how to show it ! I’ve learned that when I am upset I have the RIGHT to be upset But not the right to be bad! I’ve learned that real friendship continues to exist despite the distance And this is true also for REAL LOVE !!! I’ve learned that if someone does not love you like you want them to It does not mean that they do not love you with all their heart. I’ve learned that no matter how good of a friend someone is for you that person will hurt you every now and then and that you have to forgive him. I’ve learned that it is not enough to be forgiven by others Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself. I’ve learned that no matter how much you suffer, The world will not stop for your pain. I’ve learned that the past and the circumstances might have an influence on your personality But that YOU are responsible for what you become !!! I’ve learned that if two people have an argument it does not mean that they do not love each other I’ve learned that sometimes you have to put on the first place the person, not the facts I’ve learned that two people can look at the same thing and can see something totally different I’ve learned that regardless the consequences those WHO ARE HONEST with themselves go further in life. I’ve learned that life can be changed in a few hours by people who do not even know you. I’ve learned that even when you think there is nothing more you can give when a friend calls you, you will find the strength to help him. I’ve learned that writing just like talking can ease the pains of the soul ! I’ve learned that those whom you love the most are taken away from you too soon … I’ve learned that it is too difficult to realise where to draw the line between being friendly, not hurting people and supporting your oppinions. I’ve learned to love to be loved.

The victim, if he really loved the saver, would say, “Look, this is my problem; you don’t have to fix it for me. Just support me while I fix it myself.” That would actually be a demonstration of love: taking responsibility for your own problems and not holding your partner responsible for them. If the saver really wanted to save the victim, the saver would say, “Look, you’re blaming others for your own problems; deal with this yourself.” And in a sick way, that would actually be a demonstration of love: helping someone solve their own problems. Instead,

So, what is family? How is it best defined? Must you be related by blood? If that’s true, then how does marriage make a family of the husband and wife? Could a group of dear friends who are witness to each others’ lives, who grow old together and pledge to support one another in sickness and in health, till death do they part, be anything less?

Five Truths About Your Inner Voice: 1. It is here, always available, wherever you are, however you feel, whatever you have done. 2. It is solely on your side. 3. It knows what's absolutely right for you. 4. It is your friend, your ally, your guide, your ultimate supporter. 5. It is always with you and for you. Whenever you're feeling perplexed, uneasy, anxious, mad, frustrated, sick, or any other other way you don't want to feel, ask your Inner Voice. Listen.

Maybe money sits at the heart of every controversy about monarchy. Britain has long had trouble making up its mind. Many support the Crown, but many also feel anxious about the cost. That anxiety is increased by the fact that the cost is unknowable. Depends on who’s crunching the numbers. Does the Crown cost taxpayers? Yes. Does it also pay a fortune into government coffers? Also yes. Does the Crown generate tourism income that benefits all? Of course. Does it also rest upon lands obtained and secured when the system was unjust and wealth was generated by exploited workers and thuggery, annexation and enslaved people? Can anyone deny it? According to the last study I saw, the monarchy costs the average taxpayer the price of a pint each year. In light of its many good works that seems a pretty sound investment. But no one wants to hear a prince argue for the existence of a monarchy, any more than they want to hear a prince argue against it. I leave cost-benefit analyses to others. My emotions are complicated on this subject, naturally, but my bottom-line position isn’t. I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone. My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace. I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me. And I believe they’ll look back one day and wish they had too.

In 2012, President Barack Obama ran for re-election against Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, who didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. It was the usual bargain for J. Karacehennem and other people of the Loony Left. You supported a person whose policies you agreed with, sort of, but who you felt was too beholden to corporate interests and whose foreign policy made you sick. If you didn’t support this person, the alternative was something even worse. Voting was little more than triage.

There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of these has ever been discovered. In support of this, there is only the fact that the body of an elephant, unless he had been trapped or shot in his tracks, has rarely been found. What happens to the old and diseased? Not only natives, but many white settlers, have supported for years the legend (if it is a legend) that elephant will carry their wounded and their sick hundreds of miles, if necessary, to keep them out of the hands of their enemies. And it is said that elephant never forget" (206).

What if our understanding of ourselves were based not on static labels or stages but on our actions and our ability and our willingness to transform ourselves? What if we embraced the messy, evolving, surprising, out-of-control happening that is life and reckoned with its proximity and relationship to death? What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it? What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on? What if our lives were precious only up to a point? What if we held them loosely and understood that there were no guarantees? So that when you got sick you weren’t a stage but in a process? And cancer, just like having your heart broken, or getting a new job, or going to school, were a teacher? What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while—even if and particularly when you were dying—you would be supported by and be part of a community? And what if each of these things were what we were waiting for, moments of opening, of the deepening and the awakening of everyone around us? What if this were the point of our being here rather than acquiring and competing and consuming

When I met them sick in the hospital, it was too late. But out there in the world, I seized on every bit of joy I could scrape out of the pan. These men had lived on the margins so long that coming into the light to ask for help scared them to death. I had to walk them through the steps, keeping things fun.

Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance. When thick silver-gray beeches behave like this, they remind me of a herd of elephants. Like the herd, they, too, look after their own, and they help their sick and weak back up onto their feet. They are even reluctant to abandon their dead. Every tree is a member of this community, but there are different levels of membership. For example, most stumps rot away into humus and disappear within a couple of hundred years (which is not very long for a tree). Only a few individuals are kept alive over the centuries, like the mossy "stones" I've just described. What's the difference? Do tree societies have second-class citizens just like human societies? It seems they do, though the idea of "class" doesn't quite fit. It is rather the degree of connection-or maybe even affection-that decides how helpful a tree's colleagues will be. You can check this out for yourself simply by looking up into the forest canopy. The average tree grows its branches out until it encounters the branch tips of a neighboring tree of the same height. It doesn't grow any wider because the air and better light in this space are already taken. However, it heavily reinforces the branches it has extended, so you get the impression that there's quite a shoving match going on up there. But a pair of true friends is careful right from the outset not to grow overly thick branches in each other's direction. The trees don't want to take anything away from each other, and so they develop sturdy branches only at the outer edges of their crowns, that is to say, only in the direction of "non-friends." Such partners are often so tightly connected at the roots that sometimes they even die together.

I had been with them a little more than a year; I had been ordained a little more than two years. How inexperienced and immature I felt at this sudden crisis of such proportions. Supported by the routines of a parish priest, I had ministered to these people in their daily problems, helped them, consoled them, said Mass and brought Communion to the sick, anointed the dying. I had made many friends among them, and they trusted me, young as I was—the young American in their midst. But the war changed everything.

She looked pale, but was never sick; and I give it as another instance on how small an income, life and health may be supported.

If you love someone, support his or her passion. Be the crazy, devoted, love-sick, number-one fan that sustains him or her through times of disappointment and doubt.

Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover.

The default to studying men at times veered into absurdity: in the early sixties, observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their estrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women. (Although doctors began prescribing estrogens to postmenopausal women in droves - by the midseventies, a third would be taking them - it wasn't until 1991 that the first clinical study of hormone therapy was conducted in women.) An NIH-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn't enroll a single woman. While men can develop breast cancer - and a small number of them do each year - as Rep. Snowe noted drily at the congressional hearings, 'Somehow I find it hard to believe that the male-dominated medical community would tolerate a study of prostate cancer that used only women as research subjects.

High-reactive children raised in supportive environments are even more resistant than other kids to the common cold and other respiratory illnesses, but get sick more easily if they’re raised in stressful conditions.

Sparks come from the very source of light and are made of the purest brightness—so say the oldest legends. When a human Being is to be born, a spark begins to fall. First it flies through the darkness of outer space, then through galaxies, and finally, before it falls here, to Earth, the poor thing bumps into the orbits of planets. Each of them contaminates the spark with some Properties, while it darkens and fades. First Pluto draws the frame for this cosmic experiment and reveals its basic principles—life is a fleeting incident, followed by death, which will one day let the spark escape from the trap; there’s no other way out. Life is like an extremely demanding testing ground. From now on everything you do will count, every thought and every deed, but not for you to be punished or rewarded afterward, but because it is they that build your world. This is how the machine works. As it continues to fall, the spark crosses Neptune’s belt and is lost in its foggy vapors. As consolation Neptune gives it all sorts of illusions, a sleepy memory of its exodus, dreams about flying, fantasy, narcotics and books. Uranus equips it with the capacity for rebellion; from now on that will be proof of the memory of where the spark is from. As the spark passes the rings of Saturn, it becomes clear that waiting for it at the bottom is a prison. A labor camp, a hospital, rules and forms, a sickly body, fatal illness, the death of a loved one. But Jupiter gives it consolation, dignity and optimism, a splendid gift: things-will-work-out. Mars adds strength and aggression, which are sure to be of use. As it flies past the Sun, it is blinded, and all that it has left of its former, far-reaching consciousness is a small, stunted Self, separated from the rest, and so it will remain. I imagine it like this: a small torso, a crippled being with its wings torn off, a Fly tormented by cruel children; who knows how it will survive in the Gloom. Praise the Goddesses, now Venus stands in the way of its Fall. From her the spark gains the gift of love, the purest sympathy, the only thing that can save it and other sparks; thanks to the gifts of Venus they will be able to unite and support each other. Just before the Fall it catches on a small, strange planet that resembles a hypnotized Rabbit, and doesn’t turn on its own axis, but moves rapidly, staring at the Sun. This is Mercury, who gives it language, the capacity to communicate. As it passes the Moon, it gains something as intangible as the soul. Only then does it fall to Earth, and is immediately clothed in a body. Human, animal or vegetable. That’s the way it is. —

An NIH-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University that looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn’t enroll a single woman. While men can develop breast cancer—and a small number of them do each year—as Rep. Snowe noted drily at the congressional hearings, “Somehow, I find it hard to believe that the male-dominated medical community would tolerate a study of prostate cancer that used only women as research subjects.

Israel will not reform itself because it cannot reform itself. It is contaminated at every level, not the least the judiciary, by a virulent brew of racism and arrogance freely circulating in a body politic whose immune system has collapsed. By fostering the illusion that if Israel incorporated a handful of internal administrative reforms it would heal itself, the Report conveyed and validated the utterly counterfeit image that Israel was essentially a healthy society. But a state that every couple of years launches - with overwhelming popular support and without a hint of remorse - yet another high-tech blitzkrieg against a defenseless, trapped civilian population is profoundly sick.

One important thing was not to forget what he hoped to achieve in life. Another important thing was not to confuse a romantic picture of himself—as a doctor in Africa, for example—with a real possibility. And he tried not to lose sight of the fact that he was an adult in an adult world, with responsibilities. This was not easy: he would find himself sitting in the sun cutting out paper stars for a Christmas tree at the very moment other men were working to support large families or representing their countries in foreign places. When in moments of difficult truth-seeking he saw this incongruity, he felt sick that he should be saddled with himself, as though he were his own unwanted guest.

Commitment can be expressed in many ways. Traditionally it is solidified through marriage, owning property, having kids or wearing certain types of jewelry, but legal, domestic, or ornamental undertakings are not the only ways to show dedication. In a 2018 talk on solo polyamory at the Boulder Non-Monogamy Talk series, Kim Keane offered the following ways that people practicing nonmonogamy can demonstrate commitment to their partners: - Sharing intimate details (hopes, dreams, fears) and being vulnerable with each other. - Introducing partners to people who are important to you. - Helping your partners with moving, packing, homework, job hunting, shopping, etc. - Having regular time together, both mundane and novel. - Making the person a priority. (I suggest defining what 'being a priority' means to each of you.) - Planning trips together. - Being available to partners when they are sick or in need. - Collaborating on projects together. - Having frequent communication. - Offering physical, logistical or emotional support (e.g. at doctor's appointments or hospital visits or by helping with your partners' family, pets, car, children, taxes, etc.).

You must be your own advocate... You can't rely solely on your doctors or you family or anyone else; you have to stay on top of your own care, no matter how sick or exhausted you feel. Learn everything you can about your disease and your diagnosis, locate the very best doctors, find out exactly what drugs and treatments your doctors are giving you and what they're supposed to do, never stop researching and asking questions, and check, check, check what the doctors tell you-get second and third opinions. All of this is up to you because ultimately no one else-not your family members who love you, or your doctors, who want you to survive-is responsible for your health. You need a support team, of course, but in the end, you run this race on your own.

I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone. My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace.

How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing: 1. The biological term is depression, but you don't have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it's a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset. 2. Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don't have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.) 3. Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you're sick with a generic bug. 4. You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon. 5. The literal translation of the word depression: you are broken and devalued and have no further use. 6. No one refurbishes broken robots. 7. Please self-terminate.

1:337-338 GREAT CHANGES IN ME I CANNOT DESCRIBE I told the local astrologer that the fact that he doesn't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. A lover may perceive a certain light in the beloved's face that another person can't. A healthy person tastes a variety of flavorings in food that a patient with a coated tongue cannot. To the sick everything tastes bitter. Great changes and shifts occur in me that I cannot describe, but they are very real. Ways open. A fragrance from the divine comes through. No one sees this, but it is the most profound event in my life. Friendship cannot be seen or measured, but the experience of living within it is beyond argument. Words like belief, righteousness, and faith can be used however a debater wants. With Hasan the silk-weaver recently I spoke of the power of the Islamic prophets. Then he used my words to support his free-thinking lineage. Soul comes here from the unseen to observe this world, the body, the night, and the sunlit morning landscape, saying, I have seen this; now show me your other properties, Lord of the universes (3:26).

Religion may not be something you approve of, and that's just fine. But agrarian religious culture is going to be powerful. If you think all religious people are the same, that religion is the cause of all problems and religious people are idiots, that's your privilege; but shut up about it. As we’re less and less able to control our future, more and more people going to praying in their foxholes, maybe even you. Get over it, and stop feeling superior. And if you reject religion and don't want to see it flourish but you aren't working to provide community support, food for the hungry, care for the sick and dying, festivals of celebration and release, and a way to think about why the world of so screwed up, then expect to spend a lot of time wondering why you aren't as successful as religious groups. Don't blame it on religion – blame it on the fact that you aren't very good a doing the things that religion does very well for many of us.

Every human being asks pertinent questions regarding how to live, what to believe in, and what we aspire to become. Throughout life, we question what desires and principles to value and prioritize – love, friendship, freedom, happiness, creativity, wealth, security. We make difficult decisions based upon what we trust constitutes ethical behavior. We balance out work and play by considering what a person’s time is worth. We encounter both joyful and unpleasant physical experiences. As we age, we modify some of our youthful assumptions and question the existence of a mystical and divine world. We engage in formal and informal educational activities, which edifying foundation support modest or dramatic shifts in our instinctive and learned behavior patterns, and alter our intellectual and emotional perspective. Each person aspires to live honorably and age gracefully despite encountering physical adversity, financial hardships, sickness, or injury.

Tamper with my memory?" I asked nervously. "Something like that." He was watching me intently, carefully, but there was humor deep in his eyes. He placed his hands against the Jeep on either side of my head and leaned forward, forcing me to press back against the door. He leaned in even closer, his face inches from mine. I had no room to escape. "Now," he breathed, and just his smell disturbed my thought processes, "what exactly are you worrying about?" "Well, um, hitting a tree —" I gulped "— and dying. And then getting sick." He fought back a smile. Then he bent his head down and touched his cold lips softly to the hollow at the base of my throat. "Are you still worried now?" he murmured against my skin. "Yes." I struggled to concentrate. "About hitting trees and getting sick." His nose drew a line up the skin of my throat to the point of my chin. His cold breath tickled my skin. "And now?" His lips whispered against my jaw. "Trees," I gasped. "Motion sickness." He lifted his face to kiss my eyelids. "Bella, you don't really think I would hit a tree, do you?" "No, but I might." There was no confidence in my voice. He smelled an easy victory. He kissed slowly down my cheek, stopping just at the corner of my mouth. "Would I let a tree hurt you?" His lips barely brushed against my trembling lower lip. "No," I breathed. I knew there was a second part to my brilliant defense, but I couldn't quite call it back. "You see," he said, his lips moving against mine. "There's nothing to be afraid of, is there?" "No," I sighed, giving up. Then he took my face in his hands almost roughly, and kissed me in earnest, his unyielding lips moving against mine. There really was no excuse for my behavior. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn't seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck, and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure. I sighed, and my lips parted. He staggered back, breaking my grip effortlessly. "Damn it, Bella!" he broke off, gasping. "You'll be the death of me, I swear you will." I leaned over, bracing my hands against my knees for support. "You're indestructible," I mumbled, trying to catch my breath. "I might have believed that before I met you.

their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny. And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she was of but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die! If my poor old grandmother now lives, she lives to suffer in utter loneliness; she lives to remember and mourn over the loss of children, the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of great-grandchildren. They are, in the language of the slave’s poet, Whittier,— “Gone, gone, sold and gone To the rice swamp dank and lone, Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings, Where the noisome insect stings, Where the fever-demon strews Poison with the falling dews, Where the sickly sunbeams glare Through the hot and misty air:— Gone, gone, sold and gone To the rice swamp dank and lone, From Virginia hills and waters— Woe is me, my stolen daughters!

This is a problem because, while the urban tribe may be the most supportive figures in our twenties, they are not the most transformative. The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know—those who never make it into our tribe—who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.

If your boundaries have been injured, you may find that when you are in conflict with someone, you shut down without even being aware of it. This isolates us from love, and keeps us from taking in safe people. Kate had been quite controlled by her overprotective mother. She’d always been warned that she was sickly, would get hit by cars, and didn’t know how to care for herself well. So she fulfilled all those prophecies. Having no sense of strong boundaries, Kate had great difficulty taking risks and connecting with people. The only safe people were at her home. Finally, however, with a supportive church group, Kate set limits on her time with her mom, made friends in her singles’ group, and stayed connected to her new spiritual family. People who have trouble with boundaries may exhibit the following symptoms: blaming others, codependency, depression, difficulties with being alone, disorganization and lack of direction, extreme dependency, feelings of being let down, feelings of obligation, generalized anxiety, identity confusion, impulsiveness, inability to say no, isolation, masochism, overresponsibility and guilt, panic, passive-aggressive behavior, procrastination and inability to follow through, resentment, substance abuse and eating disorders, thought problems and obsessive-compulsive problems, underresponsibility, and victim mentality.

short term always leaves us in a place worse off than when we started. — To properly heal from addiction, we need a holistic approach. We need to create a life we don’t need to escape. We need to address the root causes that made us turn outside ourselves in the first place. This means getting our physical health back, finding a good therapist, ending or leaving abusive relationships, learning to reinhabit our bodies, changing our negative thought patterns, building support networks, finding meaning and connecting to something greater than ourselves, and so on. To break the cycle of addiction, we need to learn to deal with cravings, break old habits, and create new ones. To address all of this is an overwhelming task, but there is a sane, empowering, and balanced approach. But before we discuss how to implement solutions to the Two-Part Problem, we need to address one of the bigger issues that women and other historically oppressed folks need to consider, which is how patriarchal structures affect the root causes of addiction, how they dominate the recovery landscape, and what that means for how we experience recovery. If we are sick from sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, microaggressions, misogyny, ableism, American capitalism, and so on—and we are—then we need to understand how recovery frameworks that were never built with us in mind can actually work against us, further pathologizing characteristics, attributes, and behaviors that have been used to keep us out of our power for millennia. We need to examine what it means for us individually and collectively when a structure built by and for upper-class white men in the early twentieth century dominates the treatment landscape.

patients who are quick to claim that their pain and “battle scars” are worse than those of other patients are an unfortunate reality in waiting rooms, support groups, and Internet forums. Both scenarios create internal divisions that weaken one of the greatest assets patients have in a healthy world: the solidarity of the illness experience.

The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. It’s become quite clear to me as I’ve been sick. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.

The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. It’s become quite clear to me as I’ve been sick. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’ 

I can’t help but wonder if the divisions wouldn’t be so dramatic and the social media fallout so contentious if, in those initial encounters in exam rooms and hospitals, in those first exchanges of Internet research and queries, patients and parents felt more supported, and physicians felt less besieged. The ingredient that seems to be missing so often is collaboration.

(1) reward is not contentment, and pleasure is not happiness; (2) reward is dopamine, and contentment is serotonin; (3) chronic excess reward interferes with contentment; (4) business has conflated pleasure with happiness consciously and with clear-cut intent, specifically to get you to buy its junk or engage in hedonic behaviors favorable to industry; (5) government has passed legislation to make it easier to buy that junk or make easier access to engage in those behaviors to drive profit and GDP, and the Supreme Court has justified and supported these practices; and (6) buying that junk or engaging in those behaviors long-term and without thought can leave you and society fat, sick, stupid, broke, addicted, depressed, and most decidedly unhappy.

One of the central loves of my life is coaching and supporting other writers. Specifically, writers who identify as BIPOC, sick/Mad/disabled, queer/trans, femme, working-class/poor, or some or all of the above. I want marginalized writers to get our writing in the world, and I believe in sharing the skills I’ve gained over the past two decades of being a working writer, writing teacher and editor to help us get there.

When states need to slash government spending on education, health care, or old age pensions, mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives must pick up the slack, diverting their energies to care for the young, the sick, and the elderly. Capitalism thrives on women’s unpaid labor in the home because women’s care work supports lower taxes. Lower taxes mean higher profits for those already at the top of the income ladder—mostly men.

Most Web activities do not generate jobs and revenue at the rate of past technological breakthroughs. When Ford and General Motors were growing in the early part of the twentieth century, they created millions of jobs and helped build Detroit into a top-tier U.S. city. Today, Facebook creates a lot of voyeuristic pleasure, but the company doesn’t employ many people and hasn’t done much for Palo Alto; a lot of the “work” is performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers. You could say that the real work is done by its users, in their spare time and as a form of leisure. Web 2.0 is not filling government coffers or supporting many families, even though it’s been great for users, programmers, and some information technology specialists. Everyone on the Web has heard of Twitter, but as of Fall 2010, only about three hundred people work there.

On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little life-saving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat. But the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to become associated with the station and give their time and money and effort for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little life-saving station grew. Some of the members of the life-saving were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it as sort of a club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The life-saving motif still prevailed in this club`s decoration, and there was a liturgical lifeboat in the room where the club initiations were held. About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick and some had black skin and some had yellow skin. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwrecks could be cleaned up before coming inside. At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club`s life-saving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon life-saving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. So they did just that. As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another `spin-off` life saving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit the sea coast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along the shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown.

If you can't tell from my rap lyrics already, yes I am a feminist. And when I'm saying "hoe" or "bitch" I am actually referring to men. ...That sounded bad, in someway. But at the end of the day, I'm sick of rappers using "bitches" and "hoes" as terms towards women. Feminists are NOT a hate group. Feminists are not all female. Nor has it got an anti-male agenda. It's about equality! I've had a weird, special bond with women since I was a kid. And it's just a shame really that I'm gay.

In editing a volume of Washington's private letters for the Long Island Historical Society, I have been much impressed by indications that this great historic personality represented the Liberal religious tendency of his time. That tendency was to respect religious organizations as part of the social order, which required some minister to visit the sick, bury the dead, and perform marriages. It was considered in nowise inconsistent with disbelief of the clergyman's doctrines to contribute to his support, or even to be a vestryman in his church. In his many letters to his adopted nephew and younger relatives, he admonishes them about their manners and morals, but in no case have I been able to discover any suggestion that they should read the Bible, keep the Sabbath, go to church, or any warning against Infidelity. Washington had in his library the writings of Paine, Priestley, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and other heretical works. [The Religion of Washington]

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7 SEPTEMBER 24 God makes you strong enough by His supportive presence. That is what He is: supportive. By His power He makes you strong enough to stand against anything. Unfairness, injustice, hate, pain, sickness, weakness, infidelity—such are the enemies of human beings. Time and time again, a person falters under the onslaught of all this. Sometimes, after you have battled long and been thrown back many times and so many difficulties lie in your path, life throws the whole book at you, and you feel like giving up. Have you ever felt like giving up? I have. I’d hate to tell you how many times I’ve felt like giving up. But do you know something? You must never give up. Never. You must do like Paul: You must fight the good fight. You must finish the course. You must keep the faith. No, as a Christian you must never give up. As a human being you must never give up. And if you know this fact, this truth, that He whom they call Emmanuel is with you, you never will give up.

Oh God. We’re talking about me being naked, in the shower with cooter cream. Please world, end. Kill me. “I know it’s not soap. I just… if it’s scented… I can’t do scented. Flowers and stuff like that. Fruit-flavored soaps make… things… burnish.” She could tell from the peeks at his face Mr. Fitzwell had never stepped foot in bath and lotion store, wanting to try the array of fun fragrances. Nor had he purchased Peppermint Candy shower gel, foamed up his nether regions, and felt like he had dipped them in lava. Dove crossed and uncrossed her legs at the memory. Mr. Fitzwell seemed concerned. “Okay, just a heads-up. It’s definitely not good to put any fruits or plant life near your genitals.” He made a V with his hands and formed his own pretend vagina in front of his pants. Dove covered her eyes and tried to defend herself because now she could hear the sickly older woman beating her supporters with a purse. Dove’s mumbling got louder with her embarrassment. “I don’t put weird things down… there. Just make sure that the cream’s vagina-scented. Just plain. For vaginas.” She kept her eyes on the counter.

It’s a demonic feedback loop. Let me see if I can get this straight. Pharmaceutical companies sell mountains of drugs to factory farms, which depend on them to maintain their abnormally intensive systems. The animals develop antibiotic resistance that spreads to humans. Humans need stronger drugs. In the meantime, the animal industries flood the government with cash in exchange for subsidies. The government, invested in keeping the generous animal food lobbies flush, runs federal programs pushing people to eat increasing amounts of animal-based foods. People oblige. People get sick, requiring medication for the rest of their lives, along with expensive medical procedures. The drugs and procedures falsely assure them that they can continue to eat the food that made them sick in the first place. People continue to support the animal agriculture industry by buying their products, which pay for studies to further convince the public that animal products are an essential part of a healthy diet. People continue to support the pharmaceutical companies because they are tethered to their prescription drugs. This allows drug companies to pay for the “education” of our doctors who prescribe more drugs to us. Then pharmaceutical companies sell mountains of drugs to factory farms…

You have your faults too. I’m sure you won’t deny that.” “How could I?” “Overbearing, gloomy. You brood a lot.” “That’s true enough.” “Very demanding. Have to have your own way. She says you wore her out, asking for help, support.” “It’s all correct. And more. I’m hasty, irascible, spoiled. And what else?” “You’ve been reckless about women.” “Since Madeleine threw me out, maybe. Trying to get back my self-respect.” “No, while you still were married.” Zelda’s mouth tightened. Herzog felt himself redden. A thick, hot, sick pressure filled his chest. His heart felt ill and his forehead instantly wet. He muttered, “She made it tough for me, too. Sexually.

I give you my solemn vow to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, to stand by your side in good times and in bad, to share your joy as well as your sorrow,” I murmur. He freezes. His only movement is to open wide his fathomless eyes and gaze at me as I continue my wedding vows. “I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals and dreams, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, to share my hopes and dreams with you, and bring you solace in times of need.” I pause, willing him to talk to me. He watches me, his lips parted, but says nothing. “And to cherish you for as long as we both shall live.” I sigh.

Often the hardest struggles in life are not the big ones: death of a family member, loss of a job, or even sickness, because in these situations the problems are “big” enough where the world knows you are struggling and the collective sympathy of friends and family negate a good portion of the hardship. However, the small struggles or the cumulation of the small ones are never seen, you often struggle alone. And they are all so widespread that even if your coworker gets your work problems, your sibling understands your family problems, or your friend understands a social problem, rarely is there someone who can sympathize with the collective weight of them all.

It was suggested that all the sick summer people be put out, then. The summer people, a large contingent of them, pointed out grimly that they had supported the town’s schools, roads, indigent, and public beaches for years with the taxes they paid on their cottages. Businesses that couldn’t break even from mid-September to mid-June stayed afloat because of their summer dollars. If they were to be treated in such a cavalier fashion, the people of Ogunquit could be sure that they would never come back. They could go back to lobstering and clamming and grubbing quahogs out of the dirt for a living. The motion to escort sick summer people out of town was defeated by a comfortable margin.

I recall the way an old history professor of mine defined poverty: He said the poor are the ones who can never afford to have any bad luck. They can’t get an infection because they don’t have access to any medicine. They can’t get sick or miss their bus or get injured because they will lose their menial labor job if they don’t show up for work. They can’t misplace their pocket change because it’s actually the only money they have left for food. They can’t have their goats get sick because it’s the only source of milk they have. On and on it goes. Of course, the bad news is, everybody has bad luck. It’s just that most of us have margins of resources and access to support that allow us to weather the storm, because we’re not trying to live off $2.00 a day.

People often have a romantic ideal of the forest, but if you sit under a tree, every insect within a ten-metre radius will make a beeline for you. It’s not romantic. It is, however, transformative. To feel its pulse, its rhythm, its life. To learn its ways, its regenerative power, its creative prowess. When we look at trees, we think of them as trucks, branches, and leaves. We forget that under the ground there is a vast and complex system of intertwined roots that is as large and fascinating as the system above the soil. It is through this underground system that the trees talk to each other, warn each other of danger, help the sick trees, support the elderly ones, and generally have an elaborate and purposeful way of communicating with the whole ecological community.

My stump speech became less a series of positions and more a chronicle of these disparate voices, a chorus of Americans from every corner of the state. “Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect. “That’s about it. It’s not a lot. And although they don’t expect government to solve all their problems, they do know, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities government could help.” The room would be quiet, and I’d take a few questions. When a meeting was over, people lined up to shake my hand, pick up some campaign literature, or talk to Jeremiah, Anita, or a local campaign volunteer about how they could get involved. And I’d drive on to the next town, knowing that the story I was telling was true; convinced that this campaign was no longer about me and that I had become a mere conduit through which people might recognize the value of their own stories, their own worth, and share them with one another. —

In the first fifteen chapters of this book, I hope I have made a cogent case that: (1) reward is not contentment, and pleasure is not happiness; (2) reward is dopamine, and contentment is serotonin; (3) chronic excess reward interferes with contentment; (4) business has conflated pleasure with happiness consciously and with clear-cut intent, specifically to get you to buy its junk or engage in hedonic behaviors favorable to industry; (5) government has passed legislation to make it easier to buy that junk or make easier access to engage in those behaviors to drive profit and GDP, and the Supreme Court has justified and supported these practices; and (6) buying that junk or engaging in those behaviors long-term and without thought can leave you and society fat, sick, stupid, broke, addicted, depressed, and most decidedly unhappy.

love not mattering to you?” “I want to marry you.” “What?” “If you’ll have me. I’m aware I will need to grovel for a few months to make up for it.” “Yes,” Gabrielle agreed. Puss increased his pace a bit, but still affected an air of disinterest. “But,” Steffen sidled up to her. This time Gabrielle didn’t pull back when he caressed her cheek. “I can promise to be devoted to you, to love you not because of your appearance—even though you are the most beautiful woman I have set eyes upon—but because you’re you. I promise to adore you, and treasure you, to buy you new swords and plum rolls until you are sick of them, and to get along with that cat of yours. I’m not the hero you are, but I’ll do everything in my power to support you. And if I’m left behind, I will be every bit as heartbroken as my father, but I will still be grateful that I had you for a time.

it was not only his competence that the nuns praised, they spoke of his thoughtfulness and tenderness. Of course he could be very tender. He was at his best when you were ill; he was too intelligent to exasperate, and his touch was pleasant, cool and soothing. By some magic he seemed able by his mere presence to relieve your suffering. She knew that she would never see again in his eyes the look of affection which she had once been so used to that she found it merely exasperating. She knew now how immense was his capacity for loving; in some odd way he was pouring it out on these wretched sick who had only him to look to. She did not feel jealousy, but a sense of emptiness; it was as though a support that she had grown so accustomed to as not to realise its presence were suddenly withdrawn from her so that she swayed this way and that like a thing that was top-heavy.

If only you would go to the university," he said. "Only enlightened and holy people are interesting, it's only they who are wanted. The more of such people there are, the sooner the Kingdom of God will come on earth. Of your town then not one stone will be left, everything will he blown up from the foundations, everything will be changed as though by magic. And then there will be immense, magnificent houses here, wonderful gardens, marvellous fountains, remarkable people.... But that's not what matters most. What matters most is that the crowd, in our sense of the word, in the sense in which it exists now -- that evil will not exist then, because every man will believe and every man will know what he is living for and no one will seek moral support in the crowd. Dear Nadya, darling girl, go away! Show them all that you are sick of this stagnant, grey, sinful life. Prove it to yourself at least!

• Can I give a smile at almost everyone I see even if I have a bad day! .. Yes I can • Can I tell a new co-worker a shortcut way to come to work instead of the long one he told us to save him/her sometime every day! .. Yes, I can. • Can I buy a flower or a bouquet and visit a sick person that I do not know at the hospital maybe once a week or once a month! .. Yes, I can. • Can I say Happy Birthday to someone you don’t know but you heard like today years ago he/she was born! .. Yes, I can. • Can I congratulate my neighbor for their newborn child by sending a greeting card or even verbally! .. Yes, I can. • Can I buy a hot meal or give away a coat to a homeless person when it is too cold or the same meal and an ice-cream when it is too hot! .. Yes I can • Can ask someone about another one who is important to the first to inquire about his health, condition, how he/she is doing so far! .. Yes I can • Can I give a little bit of time to my child (or children) every day as a personal time where we could talk, play, discuss, solve, think, enjoy, argue, hang out, play sports, watch, listen, eat, and/or entertain together! .. Yes I can. • Can I allow some time to listen to my wife without judgment but encouragement almost every day! … Yes I can. • Can I respectfully talk to my husband at least once a day to show respect and appreciation to the head of our house and family! .. Yes, I can. • Can I buy a flower and give it to someone I care about and say "I love you" and when the person asks you "what this for" you reply "because I love you". Yes, I can. • Can I listen to anyone who I feel needs someone else to listen to him/her! .. Yes, I can. • Can I give away the things that I do not use anyone to others who might need them! .. Yes, I can. • Can I buy myself something that I do adore and then enjoy it! .. Yes, I can. • Can I (fill in the blanks)! .. Yes I can.

There is a long tradition of thinking about the relationship between the economy and society, starting with the founders of the Fabian Society and the LSE, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Beatrice spent years collecting data in the poorest parts of London and seeing the impact of deprivation first hand. As a member of the 1909 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, she authored a dissenting minority report that rejected the harsh system of workhouses and Britain’s piecemeal approach to supporting those in poverty. In it, she argued that a new social contract for the UK would ‘secure a national minimum of civilised life … open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and a modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged’.4 More than one hundred years later, that is still an aspiration in most countries in the world.

The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police. When a person fell sick, the family took care of her. When a person grew old, the family supported her, and her children were her pension fund. When a person died, the family took care of the orphans. If a person wanted to build a hut, the family lent a hand. If a person wanted to open a business, the family raised the necessary money. If a person wanted to marry, the family chose, or at least vetted, the prospective spouse. If conflict arose with a neighbour, the family muscled in. But if a person’s illness was too grave for the family to manage, or a new business demanded too large an investment, or the neighbourhood quarrel escalated to the point of violence, the local community came to the rescue.

What’s most original about our city is how difficult it can be to die there. Difficulty, though, isn’t exactly right, and it would be better to talk about discomfort. It’s never pleasant to be sick, but there are cities and countries that support you in your sickness, where, in some fashion, you can let yourself go. A sick person needs softness, he likes to lean on something, that’s only natural. But in Oran, the excesses of the climate, the rate of doing business, the facile ornament, the quickness of dusk and the characteristic pleasures—these all demand good health. A patient finds himself quite alone. Think of the person who is dying, caught in the trap of a hundred walls sizzling in the heat, while at the same minute, a whole population is on the telephone or in cafés, talking about bank drafts, bills of lading, or discounts. You understand what might be uncomfortable about death, even modern death, when it arises in such a dry place.

Now everyone knows that to try to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile to the Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy. For in effect there is a cultural war between spokespersons for the West and those of the Muslim and Arab world. In so inflamed a situation, the hardest thing to do as an intellectual is to be critical, to refuse to adopt a rhetorical style that is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing, and to focus instead on those issues like U.S. support for unpopular client re­gimes, which for a person writing in the U.S. are somewhat more likely to be affected by critical discussion. Of course, on the other hand, there is a virtual cer­tainty of getting an audience if as an Arab intellectual you passionately, even slavishly support U.S. policy, you attack its critics, and if they happen to be Arabs, you invent evi­dence to show their villainy; if they are American you confect stories and situations that prove their duplicity; you spin out stories concerning Arabs and Muslims that have the effect of defaming their tradition, defacing their history, accentuating their weaknesses, of which of course there are plenty. Above all, you attack the officially ap­ proved enemies-Saddam Hussein, Baathism, Arab na­tionalism, the Palestinian movement, Arab views of Israel. And of course this earns you the expected accolades: you are characterized as courageous, you are outspoken and passionate, and on and on. The new god of course is the West. Arabs, you say, should try to be more like the West, should regard the West as a source and a reference point. · Gone is the history of what the West actually did. Gone are the Gulf War's destructive results. We Arabs and Mus­lims are the sick ones, our problems are our own, totally self-inflicted. A number of things stand out about these kinds of performance. In the first place, there is no universalism here at all. Because you serve a god uncritically, all the devils are always on the other side: this was as true when you were a Trotskyist as it i's now when you are a recanting former Trotskyist. You do not think of politics in terms of interrelationships or of common histories such as, for instance, the long and complicated dynamic that has bound the Arabs and Muslims to the West and vice versa. Real intellectual analysis forbids calling one side innocent, the other evil. Indeed the notion of a side is, where cultures are at issue, highly problematic, since most cultures aren't watertight little packages, all homogenous, and all either good or evil. But if your eye is on your patron, you cannot think as an intellectual, but only as a disciple or acolyte. In the back of your mind there is the thought that you must please and not displease.

It’s simple,” Jane insisted. “I know just how to do it. Instead of just locking up the women who are suspected of being ill, we should lock up all the women. That way, the ones who are well can never get sick.” At the foot of the table, Whitting scratched his head. “But…how would men use their services?” “What do men have to do with it?” Jane asked. “Um.” Lord James looked down. “I take your point, Bradenton. This is…perhaps not the best conversation to be having at the moment.” “After all,” Jane continued, “if men were capable of infecting women, our government in its infinite wisdom would never choose to lock up only the women. That would be pointless, since without any constraint on men, the spread of contagion would never stop. It would also be unjust to confine women for the sin of being infected by men.” She smiled triumphantly. “And since our very good Marquess of Bradenton supports the Act, that could never be the case. He would never sign on to such manifest injustice.

These caring arrangements are unreliable and unjust. The nuclear family cannot be the assumed basic unit of care, nor can market outsourcing be the solution to the gender inequality of current care expectations or practices. In both cases, after all, women end up doing the lion's share of both unpaid and paid care work (two-thirds of paid and three-quarters of unpaid care work globally). Why should women have to do all this care work? And what if you don't have a family that can support you - what if your family has rejected you, or you have rejected them? What if you cannot afford to pay for privatised care services? At best, the consequences of this regime of care have often led to the neglect and isolation of those most in need of care, and at worst to needless sickness and death. The neoliberal insistence on only taking care of yourself and your closest kin also leads to a paranoid form of 'care for one's own' that has become one of the launch pads for the recent rise of hard-right populism across the globe.

Anastasia:I give you my solemn vow to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, to stand by your side in good times and in bad, to share your joy as well as your sorrow, I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals and dreams, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, to share my hopes and dreams with you, and bring you solace in times of need. And to cherish you for as long as we both shall live. Christian: I solemnly vow that I will safeguard and hold dear and deep in my heart our union and you, I promise to love you faithfully, forsaking all others, through the good times and the bad, in sickness or in health, regardless of where life takes us. I will protect you, trust you, and respect you. I will share your joys and sorrows and comfort you in times of need. I promise to cherish you and uphold your hopes and dreams and keep you safe at my side. All that is mine is now yours. I give you my hand, my heart, and my love from this moment on for as long as we both shall live.

The last case that Higdon presents is that of Emile, who is from Louisiana and in 1983 was visiting his sick parents at the hospital. One evening while he was at the hospital, a nurse named Debra offered to perform oral sex on him, but only if he wore a condom. After the act was complete, Debra offered to get rid of the condom filled with Emile’s sperm and must have impregnated herself, because nine months later genetic testing showed that Emile was the father of her baby. “The two never had sexual intercourse, only the one instance of oral sex with a condom.”10 The commonality in these three cases was that a man or boy was forced into fatherhood against his will and was then forced by the court against his will to pay child support. Can you imagine the uproar if a fifteen-year-old girl had sex with a thirty-four-year-old man and she was obligated in any way to him by the courts? Or if a woman passed out at a party and a man had sex with her and she was then forced to have the baby? As Warren Farrell says about reproductive rights for men:

Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11

I HATE Unnatural, Abnormal, Disgusting, Sick, Ugly, Unfit, Funny, Idiotic, Stupid, Nonsense, Immature, SICK minded, Narrow Minded, Uncultured, Filthy, Cheap, Superstitious, Ignorant, Perverted, Paraphilic, Illogical Gender Biased/sexist, Stereotypical female sex Objectification based ABNORMAL inappropriate activities and Sexism or Sexist Mentality. And people who practice this Abnormality, they are Unnatural, Abnormal, Disgusting, Sick, Ugly, Unfit, Funny, Idiotic, Stupid, Nonsense, Immature, SICK minded, Narrow Minded, Uncultured, Filthy, Cheap, Superstitious, Ignorant, Perverted, Paraphilic, Illogical Gender Biased/sexist, Stereotypical female sex Objectification based SICK minded humanoid Species But They Are NOT HUMAN. And I Support Solid Male Sex Objectification or Male Sexualization based world or Male Sex Symbol or Male Sexual Image or whatever you say. Because This world is Natural, Normal, Real and Truth. And Male Sex Objectification or Male Sexualization is a Part of The Real Sex. Because Male Beauty and Male Body is a Work of Art and It's A Gift for women From God. And That's The Truth.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

If the emotion of disgust is an evolved defense against disease, several predictions follow. One is that disgust should be evoked most strongly by disease-carrying substances. The second is that these disgust elicitors should be universal across cultures. Empirical research supports both predictions (Curtis & Biran, 2001). People from cultures ranging from the Netherlands to West Africa find foods potentially contaminated by parasites or unhygienic preparation to be exceptionally disgusting. Examples are rotting flesh, dirty food, bad-smelling food, food leftovers, moldy food, a dead insect in food, and witnessing food preparation by someone with dirty hands. Foods that have had contact with worms, cockroaches, or feces evoke especially strong disgust reactions. A third prediction is that the disgust should activate the immune system. One study found that showing people images of contaminated food actually elevated their body temperature—one of the key features of immune response to disease (Stevenson et al., 2012). A fourth prediction is that the people should show an especially good memory for objects that have been touched by sick or diseased individuals—a prediction supported in studies conducted in both Portugal and the United States (Fernandez, Pandeirada, Soares, & Nairne, 2017).

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

According to the antimicrobial hypothesis, spices kill or inhibit the growth of microorganisms and prevent the production of toxins in the foods we eat and so help humans to solve a critical problem of survival: avoiding being made ill or poisoned by the foods we eat (Sherman & Flaxman, 2001). Several sources of evidence support this hypothesis. First, of the 30 spices for which we have solid data, all killed many of the species of foodborne bacteria on which they were tested. Can you guess which spices are most powerful in killing bacteria? They are onion, garlic, allspice, and oregano. Second, more spices, and more potent spices, tend to be used in hotter climates, where unrefrigerated food spoils more quickly, promoting the rapid proliferation of dangerous microorganisms. In the hot climate of India, for example, the typical meat dish recipe calls for nine spices, whereas in the colder climate of Norway, fewer than two spices are used per meat dish on average. Third, more spices tend to be used in meat dishes than in vegetable dishes (Sherman & Hash, 2001). This is presumably because dangerous microorganisms proliferate more on unrefrigerated meat; dead plants, in contrast, contain their own physical and chemical defenses and so are better protected from bacterial invasion. In short, the use of spices in foods is one means that humans have used to combat the dangers carried on the foods we eat. The authors of the antimicrobial hypothesis are not proposing that humans have a specialized evolved adaptation for the use of spices, although they do not rule out this possibility. Rather, it is more likely that eating certain spices was discovered through accident or experimentation; people discovered that they were less likely to feel sick after eating leftovers cooked with aromatic plant products. Use of those antimicrobial spices then likely spread through cultural transmission—by imitation or verbal instruction.

Human beings are capable of extraordinary things. We can create and we can destroy, we can love or we can hate. Some people believe they have souls. While others think that there is only this. Just this. Reality. The news. Killings, wars, bombings, hate, prejudice. Death. And death? No one ever dies on television. Only the bad guys do. Not you. Just them. So death is without meaning. Happens without meaning due to media. We see but don't feel, we watch but haven't experienced. We can only sympathize. A gun doesn't fire on it's own and a fanatic doesn't just wake up one day and become a murderer. Hate doesn't have a face. Death doesn't have a face. Human beings become that face. All of us everyday. Whether you like it or not. Why? Because this is a mindset a culture a history. From the time we are children we are taught that this is right and this is wrong. This is what a man does. This is what a woman does. Children emulate the behaviors of adults. Parents, movie characters and just about everyone else. We live in a society based on ideals. We celebrate the intelligence of the human race and then we take on the guises of everything the opposite of that belief we've ever known and support violence, support war. Behaviors that any intelligent race should have abandoned many years ago. We are surrounded by violence, surrounded by what we still are and what we are not becoming. Frankly we are all still just primitives and not capable in any way shape or form of creating a complete and everlasting peace and that's the sad reality of it all and always has been. We're just human. Only human. The good, the bad and the ugly. The evil, the damaged and the sick. The rich, the poor and all the rest of us. So look at it this way. You can't change the world or make the world stop killing. You can't stop violence or hatred but you can walk away from it all. Violence is a part of being human. But so is love. So? Only fight if you have to. Live peacefully and as a peace keeper and do what you can to make the small part of your own world a better place. Whether that's thru creation, protest, teaching or just being who you are and doing what you do. You can't stop humanity from being humanity and you certainly can't stop all the horrible things that happen around the world everyday. So accept it. Light a candle, say a prayer, donate or meditate, listen to some music, write. But even if the human race isn't everything you wish it could be? Hold on to love. Hold onto friends. Hold onto hope or whatever religion or belief that guides you through the dark. Because in the end? You're just human and that's all that you can do. The best that you can do.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin.

By pressing the doctrine of disinterestedness and love into the foreground, Christianity by no means elevated the interests of the species above those of the individual. Its real historical effect, its fatal effect, remains precisely the increase of egotism, of individual egotism, to excess (to the extreme which consists in the belief in individual immortality). The individual was made so important and so absolute, by means of Christian values, that he could no longer be sacrificed, despite the fact that the species can only be maintained by human sacrifices. All "souls" became equal before God: but this is the most pernicious of all valuations! If one regards individuals as equals, the demands of the species are ignored, and a process is initiated which ultimately leads to its ruin. Christianity is the reverse of the principle of selection. If the degenerate and sick man ("the Christian") is to be of the same value as the healthy man ("the pagan"), or if he is even to be valued higher than the latter, as Pascal's view of health and sickness would have us value him, the natural course of evolution is thwarted and the unnatural becomes law. ... In practice this general love of mankind is nothing more than deliberately favouring all the suffering, the botched, and the degenerate: it is this love that has reduced and weakened the power, responsibility, and lofty duty of sacrificing men. According to the scheme of Christian values, all that remained was the alternative of self-sacrifice, but this vestige of human sacrifice, which Christianity conceded and even recommended, has no meaning when regarded in the light of rearing a whole species. The prosperity of the species is by no means affected by the sacrifice of one individual (whether in the monastic and ascetic manner, or by means of crosses, stakes, and scaffolds, as the "martyrs" of error). What the species requires is the suppression of the physiologically botched, the weak and the degenerate: but it was precisely to these people that Christianity appealed as a preservative force, it simply strengthened that natural and very strong instinct of all the weak which bids them protect, maintain, and mutually support each other. What is Christian "virtue" and "love of men," if not precisely this mutual assistance with a view to survival, this solidarity of the weak, this thwarting of selection? What is Christian altruism, if it is not the mob-egotism of the weak which divines that, if everybody looks after everybody else, every individual will be preserved for a longer period of time? ... He who does not consider this attitude of mind as immoral, as a crime against life, himself belongs to the sickly crowd, and also shares their instincts. ... Genuine love of man kind exacts sacrifice for the good of the species it is hard, full of self-control, because it needs human sacrifices. And this pseudo-humanity which is called Christianity, would fain establish the rule that nobody should be sacrificed.