2025
Marginalia Psychotherapy
categories: bookish
Good morning to everyone except commenter Leila, because this is another navel-gazing event, and we all know she is not here for that! If, similarly, you thought my last personal blog post on my personal blog was too much personal introspection and not enough hard-hitting journalism, on, this, my unmonetized webspace that I have been paying for for 20 years, probably without any contribution from you, Leila, you might want to skip this one too.
Today, we’re diving even deeper into the premium navel-gazing experience with a therapy session conducted entirely through Kindle highlights. Yes, you heard me right, I’m about to psychoanalyze myself through other people’s sentences, and to be frank, it’s probably more effective than actual therapy sessions I have had.
This sounds ridiculous, but it actually makes perfect sense when you consider how books function in my life. Rereading my own posts, I realize I’ve been circling around the same truth for years without ever naming it directly: books are not objects in my life—they are participants. They are co-conspirators in the grand project of becoming human, active agents in the ongoing conversation between who I am and who I’m becoming. What I’ve been documenting in my writing about bibliomancy, synchronicity, and the deep defense of bookish identity is really a love letter to this particular form of animate companionship, this peculiar intimacy between reader and text that transforms both parties in the encounter. The teenager who hid behind library stacks reading Interview With The Vampire wasn’t just escaping—she was apprenticing herself to a different way of being in the world, learning that books could teach her how to breathe in a world that often felt too loud, too bright, too demanding.
Perhaps what I’ve been documenting all along is the evolution of a reader who has learned to see books not as static repositories of information, but as dynamic partners in the ongoing project of making meaning from the beautiful chaos of existence. Each book I’ve ever loved has left something behind in me—a way of seeing, a turn of phrase, a deeper understanding of what it means to be human—while simultaneously taking something with it: my attention, my wonder, my willingness to be changed. This is the transaction I’ve been celebrating without naming it, the sacred exchange that happens when we allow ourselves to be truly read by the books we think we’re reading.
Anyway, that’s my theory about books as living participants rather than passive entertainment—and maybe this will become a recurring exploration here, this investigation into how literature actively shapes us. But for now, I want to share something more immediate: a collection of Kindle highlights I’ve been saving lately. These are the sentences that made me pause and think “yes, exactly”or “oh shit, that’s me” or simply made me want to remember them. Some felt intensely personal—sharp moments of recognition—while others struck me as good or interesting or solid ways of thinking about life, the universe, and everything.
Marginalia Psychotherapy
“She had always had a hard time seeing potential. It was why she was terrible at thrift store shopping: She needed to see beautiful things presented with fanfare, ideally in a stark white retail space staffed by thin, mean women.” —The Glow by Jessie Gaynor
This one made me laugh out loud because it’s so brutally accurate about my own aesthetic limitations. I am absolutely that person who needs things curated and presented properly before I can see their worth. Put me in a thrift store and I’m overwhelmed by the chaos, unable to spot the vintage treasure buried under a pile of polyester nightmares. But show me the same piece styled in a boutique window, and suddenly I can appreciate its beauty. It’s embarrassing how much I need external validation to recognize value, whether in objects or sometimes even in myself.
“Mia does this a lot, an achievement immediately becoming the new baseline and needing the next new thing.” —Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
The hedonic treadmill in one perfect sentence. I do this constantly—finish a project, get a small success, and instead of savoring it, immediately reset to “okay, but what’s next?” My brain refuses to let me sit with accomplishment for more than five minutes before it starts badgering me about how this achievement doesn’t really count and I need to prove myself all over again. It’s exhausting being unable to just be satisfied with where you are, even momentarily.
“Most people, whether they like to admit it or not, find pleasure in discussing things that are none of their business. Talking about people is fun.” —Ghost Music by An Yu
Thank you, An Yu, for giving me permission to admit what we all know but pretend we don’t: gossip is delicious. Not the cruel, destructive kind, but the basic human fascination with other people’s lives and choices. I love knowing who’s on the outs, who had a dramatic breakup and a spectacularly unhinged meltown on Facebook, who’s having a weird midlife crisis. It’s anthropological curiosity dressed up as social connection, and I cannot pretend it’s beneath me. It’s actually one of my favorite pastimes.
“I think engrossed is what I really want to feel most of the time. It’s such an ugly word, ‘engrossed,’ for such an absolutely beatific experience.” —The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
John Green articulated something I’ve always known about myself but never pinned down to words: that complete absorption in something is my preferred state of being. Whether it’s a book, a project, or even just watching someone else be passionate about their thing—I want to disappear into it entirely. The word “engrossed” does sound clinical and unattractive, but the feeling itself is exhilirating. It’s when I feel most like myself, most alive, most present. Everything else feels like I’m just marking time until I can get back to that state of total immersion.
And then there are these three quotes that hit me like a triple punch to the ego, all circling around the same uncomfortable truth about my relationship with ambition and effort:
“There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer. I’m a Floridian.” —Worry by Alexandra Tanner
“Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere.” —Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
“I’d spent my life reaching for something bigger but wanting something easier.” —Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel
These three quotes form an unholy trinity of my deepest writerly insecurities. Tanner’s Florida comment made me snort-laugh because yes, there’s something inherently unserious about being from here, about having been shaped by strip malls and humidity and Florida Man headlines. How can you be a profound intellectual when your formative experiences happened in this broke down shithole?
Lamott’s observation about print attention hit even harder because it’s so perfectly calibrated to my introverted writer’s dream: all the validation, none of the human interaction. I want people to read my words and think I’m brilliant, but I absolutely do not want to have to stand in front of them and prove it in real-time. Give me the byline, skip the book tour.
And then Heltzel just went ahead and summarized my entire life philosophy in one devastating sentence. Yes, I want to write something important, something that matters, something bigger than myself—but can I do it from my couch, in my pajamas, without having to network or pitch or perform? Can greatness come with early bedtime and minimal social anxiety? These quotes forced me to confront the uncomfortable truth that I want the rewards of serious ambition while maintaining the comfort of my small, manageable life.
“I am missing some fundamental element of preservation.” —The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld
And finally, this one, (and I know exactly what’s missing: common sense.) Basic self-preservation instincts that normal people seem to have been born with. Like not eating pizza that’s been sitting on the counter for two weeks, or avoiding abandoned streets at 4am, or using the safety doodadder on the mandolin slicer. I’m the person who will think “eh, it’s probably fine” in situations where a little healthy self-preservation would serve me well. It’s not that I’m actively trying to harm myself—it’s that I’m missing that little voice that whispers “maybe don’t do that” before I do something that could easily be avoided with just a tiny bit of forethought.
Ways of Thinking About Life, the Universe, and Everything
“Words aren’t enough, which is where art comes in, I suppose—but that’s just as complicated in a different way.” —Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
We spend so much time trying to articulate the ineffable, to capture complex emotions and experiences in words, and sometimes we just… can’t. Art fills that gap—painting, music, movement, whatever—but then you’re dealing with interpretation and subjectivity and all the messy complications that come with trying to communicate through something other than direct language. It’s a beautiful acknowledgment that all forms of expression are imperfect, but we keep trying anyway because the alternative is silence.
“Through art, paradoxes of consciousness resolve for me. I see what I will never see. I know what I will never know. And I survive what I will not survive.” —John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed
Encountering someone else’s creative work that allows us to experience impossible things—to live through experiences we’ll never have, to understand perspectives that aren’t our own, to process emotions and situations that would destroy us in real life. Art is a safe way to expand the boundaries of what it means to be human without actually having to endure everything humanity has to offer.
“This is why I respect chain-smokers like myself,” O said. “I make my own body a room of bad air.”
“Don’t you have an air purifier in your room?”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Being human is like that.” —Y/N by Esther Yi
The perfect response to basically any frustrating, contradictory, or inexplicable aspect of existence. Someone simultaneously using an air purifier while chain-smoking, creating and solving the same problem at once, then shrugging about it with the ultimate explanation for human contradiction. It’s the most relatable thing imaginable: our endless capacity for self-defeating behavior paired with resigned acceptance of our own absurdity. Why do we doom-scroll while trying to meditate? Why do we buy organic vegetables and then eat them with processed cheese? Being human is like that. It’s simultaneously an explanation and a cosmic shrug. Very Homer Simpson-esque.
“Now, what in God’s name could happen to you in sight of your own house?” —‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
This is Susan trying to convince herself she’ll be safe investigating the vampire-infested Marsten House because she can see her own home from there. Within pages, she’s grabbed from behind, and by the end of the book she’s one of the undead stalking the streets of Salem’s Lot. It’s such a perfectly human bit of magical thinking—creating arbitrary boundaries around danger and then actually believing in them. Of course proximity to safety doesn’t make you safe, but we tell ourselves these stories anyway because otherwise we’d never leave the house. Susan’s logic is so reasonable and so completely useless, which makes what happens to her even more devastating.
“The world was filled with forgotten places that had been something else once, had contained something else once, renamed by whatever you did there now.” —Absolution (Southern Reach, #4) by Jeff VanderMeer
Transformation is never clean, we’re always building on top of something usually without fully understanding what we’re covering up. Reading Absolution, I kept thinking about how certain catastrophes feel predetermined, how the past keeps bleeding through no matter how thoroughly we try to rename it. There’s something unsettling about the idea that every space carries the weight of what it used to be, that our attempts to reinvent places (or ourselves) are always incomplete.
Your turn: what quotes have been psychoanalyzing you lately? Please feel free to share your own marginalia therapy sessions in the comments!
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Albert says
This is one of your best. Your ability to honestly analyze yourself, although I think in too harsh a light, is one of your greatest strengths as a writer. Also, I don't agree that you don't see potential. Look at how many illustrations you were able to weave in the narrative of your books. Anyone who can place Dulac and Carrington together in one edition sees not only potential, but the whole world view. (Ganze Weltanschauung)
Don't worry about Florida, by the time you're my age it will be three feet under water.
Semra says
“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” - Franz Kafka