Once upon a time, in a perfectly reasonable village called Mildreactionville, there lived a woman who felt things. Not quietly, politely, she felt out loud.
When she laughed, birds reconsidered their life choices. When she cried, the well overflowed. When she got angry, the goats filed formal complaints.
The villagers, who preferred emotions to arrive laminated and pre-approved, held an emergency meeting.
“We must label her,” they decided, rubbing their chins in unison. Labels, after all, are cheaper than empathy.
And so they stamped her with the village’s favorite word: HYSTERICAL.
Problem solved. Feelings dismissed. Tea resumed.
Hysteria as a Social Silencing Tool
Let’s be honest: “Hysterical” isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a remote control.
It’s what society reaches for when emotions show up without an invitation, shoes on the sofa, and opinions too loud for the room.
Translation guide:
Anger – “Calm down”
Grief – “You’re overreacting”
Passion – “Why are you so intense?”
Truth – “Let’s not get emotional”
In short, Please stop feeling so loudly. Your inner world is interrupting our outer comfort.
Calling someone hysterical is the emotional equivalent of putting a hand over a speaker and saying,“Shhh. You’re making the furniture uncomfortable.”
Meanwhile… Collective Hysteria Enters the Chat
Here’s the plot twist nobody talks about.
While individuals get shushed, crowds get a free pass.
One person panics? – Hysterical.
A million people panic together? – The market reacted.
A woman cries on the internet? – Dramatic.
A whole nation loses its mind over a forwarded message at 6 a.m.? – IMPORTANT. MUST READ. SHARE IMMEDIATELY.
Ah yes. Collective hysteria – the only form of madness that comes with charts, hashtags, and expert panels.
We watch stock markets faint on a rumor. We watch mobs sprint toward outrage like it’s a clearance sale. We watch trends rise, collapse, resurrect, and collapse again – all before lunch.
And somehow… that’s called being informed.
The Sacred Ritual of Viral Outrage
Every episode follows the same holy steps:
1. Someone says something.
2. Someone screenshots it.
3. Everyone loses their minds together.
4. Nobody reads the original thing.
5. Apologies are issued in fonts of regret.
6. Outrage gets bored and moves on.
No one is hysterical here. This is engagement.
Now, Back to the Village…
In Mildreactionville, the woman eventually learned to whisper her feelings into jars. She labeled them:
“Inconvenient Joy”
“Unscheduled Grief”
“Too Much Truth”
Meanwhile, the villagers began shouting together – about prices, rumors, weather, morals, and goats.
They called it public discourse.
So remember…
If one person feels too much, they’re hysterical. If everyone feels too much together, it’s a movement.
If you cry, lower your voice. If the internet screams, turn up the volume.
And if a WhatsApp forward wakes you at 6 a.m. claiming the world will end by Tuesday…
That’s not hysteria. That’s just breakfast news.
Now please stop laughing so loudly. You’re making society uncomfortable.
In a city celebrated for its monuments, there lived a woman whose work no one could name.
She was not an architect, though she walked among buildings. She was not a priest, though people felt calmer after speaking with her. She was not a ruler, though the city remained intact because of her.
Her task was to tend the spaces.
She measured the silence between bells so that time would not feel rushed. She adjusted the distance between stones so walls could breathe. She lingered in conversations long enough for truth to arrive on its own.
When asked what she built, she said, “I make room.”
Most did not understand.
The city’s leaders valued height and speed. They wanted structures that impressed, answers that concluded, plans that filled every uncertainty. Empty space made them uneasy.
“What purpose does silence serve?” they asked her.
“So that something real can enter,” she replied.
One day, a young leader came to her privately.
“I have done everything right,” he said. “I speak often. I decide quickly. Still, the people feel distant.”
She invited him to walk with her at dawn.
They crossed a bridge as the city slept. She stopped midway and said nothing.
Minutes passed. The leader grew restless.
Then, without prompting, he spoke differently. Not as a leader, but as a person.
She smiled.
“You see,” she said, “authority doesn’t come from filling space. It comes from holding it.”
Years later, the woman vanished.
The city continued, louder than before. Bells rang without pause. Decisions stacked upon decisions. Silence was treated as inefficiency.
Slowly, fractures appeared, not in buildings, but in trust.
Only then did some remember the woman who tended what could not be seen. They began again, cautiously, listening longer, speaking less, leaving space where certainty once crowded faith.
And the city, though quieter, stood.
What Holds Us Together
Leadership often believes it must be visible to be real. Faith often believes it must be spoken to exist. The inner life often believes it must be understood to matter.
But the most enduring forces do none of these things.
True leadership creates space, for others to rise, for voices to surface, for wisdom to arrive late. It resists the urge to dominate silence and learns instead to steward it.
Faith, at its core, is not constant declaration. It is patience with mystery. It is reverence for what does not explain itself. The sacred is rarely loud. It waits.
And the inner life, the unseen architecture of who we are, is shaped less by dramatic moments than by quiet choices no one applauds – restraint, forgiveness, honesty practiced alone.
Invisible is not empty. It is structural.
Like dark matter holding galaxies together, the unseen choices we make, the pauses we allow, the silences we respect, the space we offer, quietly determine whether our lives collapse or cohere.
Perhaps maturity is learning to trust what doesn’t announce itself. Perhaps wisdom is learning to tend the gaps. And perhaps what saves us, again and again, is not what we build, but what we have the courage to leave open.
The baby arrived on a morning that smelled like rain and old books.
No one noticed the sky pause, or the way the wind leaned in closer, as if listening. But the old woman in the blue house did. She smiled, set down her teacup, and whispered, “Ah. Another beginning.”
The baby did not cry much. Instead, he stared wide-eyed, curious at dust floating through sunlight, at the way shadows learned to dance on walls. It was said that he could hear things others had forgotten how to listen to…the hum of patience, the sigh of hope, the slow heartbeat of time.
Years passed like soft pages turning.
One evening, when he was old enough to ask difficult questions, the old woman handed him a brush. Its handle was smooth, worn by decades of use.
Confused, he followed her to the riverbank. The water was dark, restless, carrying stories downstream. The old woman dipped the brush into the air itself and began to stroke the space between moments.
With every gentle brush, memories surfaced, lost laughter, unfinished dreams, forgotten courage. He watched, breath held, as the invisible became visible.
“Life,” the old woman said, “is made of what you touch carefully.”
Later that night, as stars leaned low, she brewed tea. Not just leaves and water, but silence, intention, and time. The brew glowed faintly, like something alive.
“Drink,” she said.
And in that warmth, he felt it – the courage to begin again, the patience to grow slowly, the wisdom to tend small things with great care.
Years later, the old woman was gone. The house quiet. The river unchanged.
But he remembered…
He remembered that every baby is a universe starting over. That every brush of kindness leaves a mark. That every brew of effort and hope shapes who we become.
And so he lived deliberately, painting moments gently, brewing futures thoughtfully, protecting beginnings fiercely.
Because magic, he learned, does not arrive in thunder. It arrives small. And it stays, if you tend it.
“What you nurture quietly becomes what saves you.”
So begin today – carefully, intentionally, bravely. Brush kindness into ordinary moments. Brew patience into your dreams. And never underestimate the power of small beginnings.
Let’s start with why silk robes look uncomfortable on some souls.
There once lived a village rooster who, through an administrative error of destiny, was crowned king. The villagers draped him in silk, placed him on a velvet cushion, and served him milk in a silver bowl. The rooster accepted it all with dignity, for precisely three minutes. Then he jumped off the cushion, scratched the earth, and looked offended.
“Excuse me,” he seemed to say, “this is all very generous, but where is the dust?”
The moral was obvious to everyone except the royal tailors. Some things do not suit some creatures, no matter how expensive the fabric.
This, I believe, is the central problem with winning the lottery.
Money, like silk robes, has a habit of exposing who we are rather than transforming us. It magnifies temperament. It hands a megaphone to our instincts. Give it to a miser and it sharpens his counting fingers. Give it to a dreamer and it immediately begins to evaporate into ideas. Give it to a sensible person and most tragically, it turns them into an amateur accountant.
If I won the lottery, therefore, the first thing I would do is be disappointed.
Because the first money I receive will be after taxes, which is the financial equivalent of being told you’ve won a grand feast but must begin with boiled vegetables. There is something deeply humbling about discovering that the government has already imagined your joy and improved upon it.
Still, after this necessary emotional cooling, I would proceed with great seriousness and very little glamour.
I would not buy a yacht. I get seasick on a merry go round. I would not buy diamonds. They look accusatory. I would not buy a mansion. I lose my phone in a two-bedroom apartment.
Certain things simply don’t suit certain people.
Instead, I would do what all secretly dramatic but outwardly sensible people do – prepare for emergencies. There would be careful investments, for my mother, for my children, for my husband, for my sister, and for my niece and nephew, so they may pursue their goals with courage and fewer spreadsheets. Nothing extravagant. Just enough financial cushioning to soften life’s sharper elbows.
Then, because even prudence needs a holiday, I would create a travel fund for the family, the kind that allows missed trains, wrong turns, overpacked suitcases, and stories that begin with, “This wasn’t on the itinerary…”
There would also be a yearly donation to a charity of my choice, because money, like language, should occasionally be used to say something kind.
After all this responsible behavior, after the calculators are put away and virtue has had its tea, I would do something dangerously entrepreneurial. Invest in an Airbnb business. Not because I dream of linen color palettes, but because rental income has the charming habit of arriving quietly, like a polite guest who cleans up after themselves.
If that works well and life is feeling cooperative, I would keep a portion aside for maintenance, repairs, and expansion, because even passive income has active plumbing.
And if, if after all this, there is still money left?
I would leave it exactly where it is for a while, just to see how it feels to know that abundance exists without immediately redecorating the soul.
Because in the end, winning the lottery wouldn’t turn me into someone else. It would simply make me a slightly more relaxed version of myself, still suspicious of luxury, still fond of practical dreams, still preferring dust to velvet.
And should you ever see me scratching contentedly at the ground, please don’t offer me a crown.
I’ve already learned… not everything that shines belongs on my head and not every fortune needs to be spent to prove it was real.
It began, as most catastrophes do, with confidence.
“I’m not cold,” I announced, heroically, while my body immediately betrayed me by shivering like an unpaid extra in an Arctic documentary. My teeth started auditioning for a percussion band. My knees knocked in Morse code. If fear had a ringtone, my spine was playing it on loop.
This was not cold, I told myself. This was merely… enthusiastic circulation.
The air conditioner across the room hummed smugly, clearly aware it was winning. It was one of those overachieving ACs, the kind that doesn’t cool a room so much as refrigerate your soul. Somewhere inside it, I’m certain, lived a tiny penguin adjusting the dial while whispering, “Lower.”
I wrapped myself in a shawl. The shawl laughed.
I added a sweater. The sweater shrugged.
Soon I resembled a moving laundry pile, layers upon layers, all trembling together in solidarity. The shivering had escalated from subtle quiver to full-blown interpretive dance.
I didn’t switch off the AC at first because… well, heroism demanded it. Or maybe sheer stubbornness. I wanted to prove I could endure, that I could conquer the frost with nothing but willpower and layered sweaters.
There was something absurdly satisfying about my teeth performing percussion solos, my knees sending secret messages, and my dignity slowly evaporating like steam off a frozen lake. I was basically starring in my own low budget survival documentary.
If anyone had walked in, they might’ve assumed I was rehearsing for a role titled Human Earthquake, Scene One.
Naturally, this was the moment my phone rang.
“Why are you shaking?” the caller asked.
“I’m not shaking,” I said, voice vibrating like a dial-up modem. “I’m… emotionally moved.”
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of interpretive shivering, the AC was mercifully silenced. Instantly, my body relaxed. The trembling ceased. The “laundry pile” look dissolved. Dignity crept back into the room, though probably a little embarrassed. But the damage was done.
Because now, every time someone says, “Isn’t it a bit cold?” my muscles twitch preemptively. My body remembers. It does not forgive.
And somewhere, a penguin probably sighs in relief and smiles. 🐧
The sky woke ashen, as though the night had burned itself out and left only memory behind. Smoke-colored clouds drifted low, bruised and quiet, and the town beneath them moved in half-steps, people speaking softly, as if sound itself might fracture.
Nothing had been straight since the Day of the Fall.
Doors hung askew on their hinges. Picture frames leaned like tired witnesses. Even time felt tilted, mornings arriving too soon, nights overstaying their welcome. Grief has a way of rearranging the world without asking permission.
At the edge of town stood the old forge.
No one went there anymore, except Mira.
She returned every dawn, fingers blackened with soot, heart heavier than the tools she lifted. At the center of the forge sat the anvil, scarred and patient, a block of iron that had endured centuries of blows and still did not break. Her father used to say it listened, that if you struck it honestly, it would answer in kind.
Mira believed him.
She placed a shard of broken metal upon the anvil, once part of a bell that rang before the Fall, and raised her hammer. The first strike rang out sharp, defiant. The second followed, then another, rhythm steadying her breath. With every blow, the crookedness of the world felt momentarily corrected.
Sparks flew like small rebellions against the gray.
The metal bent. It did not shatter.
By the time the sun finally broke through the clouds, Mira had shaped something new, not a bell, not a weapon, but a simple hinge. Strong. True. Capable of holding a door upright again.
She smiled, just slightly.
The world might remain ashen. Life might still feel askew. But as long as there was an anvil to stand firm against, something could always be reforged.
There was once a traveler who fell asleep at the center of a maze. He did not know how he had entered it, nor why the walls felt warm, breathing softly like animals at rest.
Before sleep took him completely, he tied a thread around his finger, just in case he needed to find his way back. When he woke up, the thread was gone. The maze had learned his name.
Before the man in the maze, there was a night when the world fell asleep all at once.
No one noticed when it happened. Clocks continued their ticking out of habit. Cities hummed like tired animals. But somewhere between the last thought and the first dream, humanity surrendered consciousness in a single, collective sigh.
That was when the world realized it was alone.
The wind tested its voice. The oceans shifted, surprised by their own weight. Mountains leaned into one another like elders finally free to speak.
“Are they gone?” asked the fire, dim but alert.
“Only dreaming,” said the earth. “Which is worse. They will remember fragments.”
So the elements gathered, not in a place, but in an arrangement. Paths folded. Distances curved. Directions lost their authority. What formed was not a prison, but a labyrinth, because a straight line, they agreed, had never taught anyone anything.
They decided the humans would walk it every night, without feet, without maps, without knowing they had entered.
In the planetary log, it is labeled Kindness Protocol. We experience it as dreams.
The Wisdom Hidden Inside the Parable
A labyrinth is not meant to confuse you. It is meant to slow you down until truth can catch up.
Existence itself behaves this way. We assume meaning lies ahead, somewhere beyond the next turn, the next achievement, the next certainty. But life, like the labyrinth, does not reward speed. It rewards attention.
The elements understood this long before we did.
Wind learned that direction is temporary. Water learned that persistence outlives force. Fire learned that creation and destruction share the same appetite. Earth learned that everything returns, whether it wants to or not.
Humans, awake, argue with these lessons. Asleep, we cannot.
So the world teaches us sideways.
Through symbols instead of sentences. Through fear instead of facts. Through dreams that feel absurd because truth rarely arrives dressed as logic.
We wake up calling them meaningless. The labyrinth calls them messages undelivered.
The Man Came Later
Only after centuries of sleep did the man appear in the maze.
He believed he had wandered in by accident. He believed there would be an exit. He believed the walls were external.
He was wrong on all counts.
The labyrinth did not trap him. It recognized him.
Every turn reflected a choice he avoided. Every dead end mirrored a certainty he clung to. At the center was no monster, only the shape of a question he had spent his life outrunning.
When he slept inside the maze, he dreamed.
And when he dreamed, the elements leaned closer.
A Thought You Can’t Unhear
We do not dream because we sleep.
We sleep because the world needs us quiet long enough to be rearranged.
So tonight, when you go to sleep, and the dream feels slightly wrong, slightly deliberate, slightly aware,
Life introduced itself as a road that refused to be straight, sometimes a classroom, sometimes a wound, sometimes a festival I didn’t know I was invited to.
I packed lightly at first, dreams too big for my pockets, beliefs handed down like heirlooms, and hope, which I later learned is the heaviest thing a human carries.
Loss came disguised as a teacher. It took my hand, then took something else instead. Success arrived loudly, posed for photographs, and left before I could ask what it actually meant.
Happiness appeared in footnotes, in laughter overheard, in borrowed moments, in tea gone cold because the conversation was warm. Sorrow stayed longer, sat beside me without speaking, and taught me how to listen.
I learned by breaking. I taught by surviving. I fell, not to fail, but to understand gravity, how even love obeys it.
Every step altered me. Every pause asked questions. Every wrong turn knew exactly where it was going.
And just when I thought the journey was ending, the road loosened its grip on my name.
I left my body like a coat worn thin by weather, and slipped quietly into the great remembering, not an end, but a return.
For consciousness does not die. It wanders.
Somewhere, a first step is being taken again, barefoot, curious, unburdened, and I realize, with tears I no longer need,
In a quiet town, there stood a bookshop that never opened. Its windows were clear, its shelves visible from the street, its lights always on. People could see the spines inside, beautiful, uncreased, unnamed. The books had titles written only in pencil, as though they were still deciding what they wanted to be.
Every day, a man stopped in front of the shop on his way to work. At first, he was irritated by it. What use was a shop that refused to sell? But over time, something curious happened. He began to slow down. Some mornings, he smiled at a particular shelf. Other days, he frowned at one book whose spine seemed to stare back at him.
He imagined what those books might say. A memoir that would finally explain his father. A travel story that would make leaving feel possible. A mystery that would give shape to the confusion he carried without naming. A story set in the future that somehow understood his present better than he did.
Years passed. The man changed jobs. Lost people. Found a few again. Every morning, as he walked down the main market street, the shop was still there – unchanged, patient, waiting.
One day, without warning, the door opened.
But the man did not rush inside. He stood very still. For he realized something unsettling and tender all at once. The books had not been closed to him. They had been waiting for him to arrive as the person who could finally read them.
So he turned the handle gently, carrying with him all the life he had lived while the shop stayed shut.
The man from the parable never spoke about the shop, but he carried its lesson quietly into the world. He learned that some doors remain closed not out of denial, but out of timing; that anticipation is not absence, but preparation.
Waiting, he discovered, was not a pause in life – it was a way of living attentively, of moving through days with a small, stubborn faith that meaning was assembling itself somewhere beyond the visible page. And it is from this exact posture of hope unhurried, unreasonable, and deeply human, that a rare breed of optimism is born.
There is a peculiar kind of optimism reserved for people who wait for books that do not yet exist.
These are not the optimists who believe traffic will clear or emails will go unanswered. No. These are the higher beings who wake up, brush their teeth, stare into the mirror, and think…One day, a book I haven’t read yet will understand me perfectly.
Until then, they live.
Take any ordinary person. Possibly you. Possibly me. Possibly someone who has already pre-ordered SmallTown Girls despite not being from a small town and not being a girl. The day begins with routine: alarm, resistance, negotiation, surrender. Somewhere between coffee and calendar reminders, the mind drifts to the future shelf – the one where A Writing Marriage, London Falling, The Midnight Train, and Platform Decay will sit, smug and complete, like wise elders who arrived late but just in time.
Mornings: Memoirs Before Emails
Morning is memoir territory. You scroll through news, family messages, and half-remembered dreams, quietly wishing Small Town Girls were already out so you could borrow someone else’s past for a while. Your own memories, after all, are scattered – unfinished anecdotes, unresolved chapters, people who were important once and now live only in contact lists you never open.
You imagine Jayne Anne Phillips writing about women who stayed, women who left, women who became stories before they became themselves. You think about your own small town moments, office cubicles, kitchen tables, bus stops, and realize...everyone is from a small town emotionally. Some towns just have better PR.
Then there’s A Writing Marriage. You read emails from colleagues, WhatsApp messages from loved ones, and you wonder, how do people build lives together while also becoming themselves? How did Lori Carlson-Hijuelos do it…with love, art, compromise, grief, and unfinished sentences? You close your inbox. No answers yet. The book isn’t out. Neither are you.
Afternoons: Travel Without Leaving the Chair
By afternoon, routine tightens its grip. Meetings multiply. Responsibilities stack like unread paperbacks. This is when London Falling begins to haunt you, not as a destination, but as an idea.
Because travel, you realize, is not always about movement. Sometimes it’s about discovering that the place you’re standing in is stranger than you thought. Patrick Radden Keefe’s forthcoming exploration of crime, family, and a city’s hidden underbelly mirrors your own day – smiling conversations layered over quiet chaos, polished surfaces hiding complicated truths.
You sip tea. You walk to the window. Somewhere in the world, a manuscript is being edited. Somewhere else, your life is doing the same thing, revising scenes, cutting characters, keeping the core intact.
Evenings: Fiction Enters the Chat
Evenings belong to fiction because reality has already said enough.
This is where The Midnight Train waits patiently, like a station that hasn’t been built yet. You imagine boarding it after dinner, revisiting moments you’d like to re-understand rather than redo. That awkward conversation. That brave decision. That time you almost became someone else.
Matt Haig’s yet to arrive train becomes a metaphor for every “what if” you carry quietly while washing dishes or folding laundry. The magic isn’t that the train travels through time, it’s that it allows compassion. Toward your past self. Toward your present confusion. Toward your unfinished future.
You don’t need the book yet. You need the promise of it.
Night: Sci-Fi, Mysteries, and Existential Snacks
Nighttime is for the big questions, preferably with snacks.
This is when Platform Decay enters like Murderbot does – sarcastic, exhausted, deeply relatable. A sentient being trying to survive systems it didn’t design? Please. That’s just adulthood with better hardware.
You laugh thinking about a “family road trip from hell” across a ringworld, because your own family WhatsApp group has already achieved similar levels of entropy. Sci-fi, you realize, isn’t about the future. It’s about exaggerating the present until it tells the truth.
And somewhere between one last scroll and sleep, mystery settles in, not just the genre, but the condition. You are a mystery to yourself. You are still being written. The ending, mercifully, does not yet write itself.
The Shelf That Waits Back
Waiting for unpublished books is not passive. It’s participatory.
It teaches patience in a world addicted to immediacy. It teaches humility, you are not the center of the story, just a reader passing through. And most importantly, it reminds you that life, like literature, unfolds in drafts.
One day, these five books will hit the shelves. You will hold them, smell them, underline them, argue with them. But until then, your routine life is doing something quietly extraordinary.
It is preparing you to read them.
And maybe, just maybe, you are also preparing yourself to become a book worth waiting for.
Pieces Of My Heart 