On Avoiding Hysteria in Hysterical Times
"I think you might have bed bugs," she said. She had spent the night and when I took her home, she had gone back to sleep. When she woke up, she had welts all over back and arms. It seemed unlikely to me that that had come from my bed because I never had any bug bites. I slept in that bed every night and no bites, so I figured they must have come from someplace else.
...that when you spend time helping the truly broken—the ones who require more patience than seems reasonable—you walk away with two revelations: how much of yourself still works, and how vital the fragile thread of kindness is that holds people together.