Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors, which feels almost ridiculous to say because reading him is rarely an enjoyable experience in the normal sense of the word. I do not finish one of his books feeling refreshed or particularly optimistic about humanity. Usually I feel like somebody reached into my head, pulled out a thought I had never properly admitted to myself, and then made some miserable Russian man say it two hundred years before I was born. I think that is why I

I met the Rose family when I was around seventeen or eighteen years old. I had just started working as a hostess at a restaurant, and most of my job was exactly what you would expect: greeting people, welcoming them in, learning names, remembering faces, making small talk while people waited for their tables. But when you work in a restaurant long enough, especially when you see the same people over and over again, some of those little conversations stop feeling like customer

“It’s genetic” sounds like an answer. For most of my life, I think I heard it that way too. If something was genetic, you were born with it. It was written somewhere inside your DNA before you had any say in the matter, and there wasn't much you could do about it. Genetics felt almost like biological fortune telling. Here are the instructions you were given. Good luck. I still catch myself thinking that way all the time. Something about my body looks like someone in my family