
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Researchers around the world began to explore the connections between psychosis and estrogen at every phase of a woman’s life. They found that early puberty seems to correlate to later onset of schizophrenia, positing that the presence of estrogen delays its debut somehow. They found that in women with preexisting psychotic disorders, severity of symptoms declined during pregnancy — when estrogen surges in a woman’s body — and then rose again after birth when estrogen tanks. Among women of childbearing age with an existing schizophrenia diagnosis, a large minority reported an increased severity of symptoms just before menstruation, when estrogen dips.
Like pre-revolution France and Russia, the United States now sustains a class of rich people who are inconceivably wealthy. Their wealth no longer makes sense in a human context—they have amassed more money than they and their entire extended families for centuries ahead could ever spend. This becomes wealth for the sake of wealth — or wealth for the sake of power. That power is working, evident in the tax breaks Trump just granted billionaires, especially for inheritance. When a country has people that wealthy living alongside people who are mortally poor, it has never ended well.