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Holly MathNerd's avatar

I wrote this for a selfish reason: the hope that articulating the fear would help me bear it better — with more stoicism, and less despair. I usually write for selfish reasons: sometimes for clarity, sometimes from a toddler-like need to name reality and remind myself I’m allowed to. Writing is one of my main mental health tools, and writing this made me both more and less depressed.

As the weather warms, I plan to spend as much time offline, outside, and buried in paper books as I can. So my posting schedule may get more erratic — or you might get more travelogues, another short story, or a handful of meandering thoughts. You will definitely get more book reviews. Or maybe not; I’m fairly unpredictable to myself right now.

But writing still helps. And while I would write either way, I do write more because I'm being read. So, thank you.

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Russell Gold's avatar

Wow. Lots to unpack there and no time to do it sufficiently. You’ve touched on a number of issues I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, including our misunderstanding of evil and how we learned the wrong lessons from the Civil Rights era, of the critical role that Christianity has played in creating the West, and the consequences of it falling (partly corrupted, partly rejected for claims of conflicts with science and bad behavior from some of its leaders), and so much more.

I would definitely say that we are losing our way as a society, and we’re full of people whose only thought is to tear it all down.

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