A year ago, I gave away my bed. I needed less clutter, in my home and in my mind, which to me meant sleeping on a cot for three months until I bought a futon and tatami mat. The cot was so narrow that one night I rolled right off it, in the middle of a dream in which I struggled to open a stubborn attic door that abruptly gave way. I went crashing to the floor, in the dream and in real life.

Still, what I missed most about my old bed wasn’t its size or comfort. What I missed most was the daily routine of making it, that satisfying, soothing morning ritual of smoothing the bottom sheet and resecuring any elasticized corners that might have released their hold on the mattress during the night and slunk into themselves. Next, I’d shake out the flat sheet, letting it drift downward, onto the mattress. Even my cat, who is annoyed by most household chores and the noises or disruptions they create, enjoyed the ritual. Granted, his enjoyment came from interrupting the bed-making — tail twitching dangerously, he pounced while the sheet was still hovering, then attacked it with startling ferocity, all teeth and claws.

Four months after my slide into depression became a freefall, I bottomed out in a psychiatric facility.

I barely recognized myself in the facility’s bathroom mirror. My eyes were startled, and my lips were unable to smile. Any attempt at one resulted in a rictus, a twisted grimace, as though I was trying and failing to replicate what I thought a smile should look like. For me, this is what depression feels (and looks) like.

Despite my brain’s inability to do much more than grasp where I was and race around the confines of my skull, desperate to escape, I noticed how colorless my mouth looked. I wasn’t wearing any lipstick.

My name is Heather, and I am not an alcoholic. 

That may sound like the punch line to a hackneyed joke mocking 12-step groups and the people who attend them, but it’s actually the introduction I made with all seriousness — and initially with more than a little trepidation — at the Alcoholic Anonymous meetings I attended shortly after my discharge from a psychiatric facility. I didn’t have a drinking problem but I did need a place where I could go for an hour or more a day and not feel judged or pitied, one where I was free to talk or to remain silent, one where I didn’t have to put on a performance that I was doing better.

“Take care.”

For years that was my family’s sign-off at the end of phone conversations and visits alike.

To me, those two words expressed a similar sentiment to saying “I love you”: concern for a person’s well-being beyond the moment when you were talking, as they continued on apart from you, and you from them.

Most of my friends who talked with their families regularly said “I love you,” but we Hugheses were a little more formal and reserved.

By first grade, Kristina Friman was using a nebulizer twice a day to keep her asthma in check. Her medication regimen included theophylline, Entex, mucomyst, and, for acute attacks, adrenaline injections. Still, her asthma only got worse: By fourth grade, she had been hospitalized multiple times and suffered a collapsed lung. At a loss for what to try next, her doctors recommended a radical form of treatment. When her parents presented it to Friman, however, the idea wasn’t so much a recommendation as a final hope.

“I was ‘asked’ if I wanted to go to this place to get better,” Friman says. “I must have said yes, because I remember trying to back out. My mother made it clear that it was too late.”

In October 1974, 10-year-old Friman left her hometown of Houston for Denver and the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital or, as everyone called it, CARIH (pronounced “Carrie”). Friman would remain in Colorado for the next 18 months.

On May 18, 1995, Seinfeld introduced a larger-than-life character into the pop culture consciousness. In “The Understudy,” Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has a chance encounter with J. (Jacopo) Peterman (John O’Hurley), a mail order clothing catalog magnate whose penchant for ornate, over-the-top dialogue left Elaine and viewers both slack-jawed and delighted. What many Seinfeld fans still might not be aware of is that the Peterman in the show is based on a real-life mail order catalog magnate by the name of J. (John) Peterman.

I spotted the small green tin while in line at Rite Aid. I don’t remember what I was waiting to buy—lipstick? paper towels? cereal?—but I do remember the Bag Balm. It was displayed among the other impulse purchase items near the registers. And it was an impulse purchase, but unlike most, this one was prompted by a series of memories triggered by that green tin.

The intense emotions we’re all experiencing right now—the yearning to see family and friends in person and without our faces partially obscured by a mask; the grief of losing loved ones, jobs, a sense of security; the restlessness with being stuck in one place—can often feel inexpressible, beyond words. But words in another language than your own just might be the key to giving voice to those emotions. To find such words, look no further than Eunoia, an online database created by Steph Smith in 2018 as part of a startup challenge. The database's name is itself an example of what it’s about: Eunoia is a Greek word meaning “well mind” or “beautiful thinking” that isn’t directly translatable in another language.

French actor Denis Lavant has a slightly simian appearance. His face, dominated by a heavy forehead, deep-set eyes and a broad, blunt nose, can move quickly from melancholy to feral. His large head sits atop a small, wiry frame. In short, he’s an unlikely leading actor, let alone a dancer; he doesn’t have the classic, or classical, physiognomy of someone who works in a medium that frequently expects physical perfection to equal or exceed that of physical prowess and artistic interpretation.

Lavant’s dancing isn’t pretty or beautiful either; it’s contorted, often frenzied, occasionally borderline grotesque, which makes it all the more mesmerizing, and never more so than during the closing credits of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail.

In December I was interviewed by Lisa Godfrey, an audio documentarian with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for a CBC Ideas podcast episode on group therapy, both the history and the practice of it. While doing research for the episode, she’d come across my essay “How AA Helped Me Recover from a Mental Breakdown—Even Though I’m Not an Alcoholic” (The Temper, February 2020). The essay was about how and why I’d found 12-step groups more useful than traditional group therapy in the aftermath of my breakdown.

When I turned 50 last year, the number didn’t hit me so hard on my actual birthday as it did when I received my first AARP membership offer shortly after. The membership offer included a free sturdy and spacious trunk-size tote. But I don’t have a car; I get around by bike.

I also don’t own a house or an apartment. I’m not married, divorced or widowed; I don’t have children. And “retirement” isn’t a word in my vocabulary — as a freelance copy editor and writer, I’ll probably be working for the rest of my life.

July: the month when fireworks, backyard barbecues, pool parties, and sharks reign supreme in America. Jaws was arguably the first movie to capitalize on a common human fear of the lethal ocean inhabitants, and 41 years later the fear and fascination are still going strong. In 2013, Syfy had a monster hit with Sharknado, an unapologetically low-budget and over-the-top TV movie that involved Los Angeles, hurricanes, helpless humans, and, yes, airborne sharks. The following year saw Sharknado 2 and the advent of “Sharknado Week,” a seven-day buffet of shark-themed movies made under the Syfy original-movie umbrella.

Among last year’s “Sharknado Week” offerings was Zombie Shark, whose bare-bones plot (sharks + diabolical experiment = menacing zombie sharks) wasn’t anything unusual for the franchise. What made Zombie Shark notable was its director, Misty Talley, the first woman to helm a Syfy original movie.

I first encountered Tim Youd’s performance art mid-performance, in front of Faulkner House Books in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Seated at a card table, pecking away on an Olivetti Studio 44, the Los Angeles–based performance artist was retyping, word for word, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, the fortieth entry in his 100 Novels Project. “I’m an unorthodox typist,” Youd said wryly. “I’d say that I’m probably as good as I’m going to get.” For the project, Youd was retyping, as the title suggests, 100 novels, each on a single, continuously rolled sheet of paper.