Skyler Autumn

“After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Neuroscientists have been trying for years to pin down what it is about travel that alters us, how it effects mental change. Neural pathways become ingrained, automatic, if they operate only by habit. They are highly attuned to alterations, to novelty. New sights, sounds, languages, tastes, smells stimulate different synapses in the brain, different message routes, different webs of connection, increasing our neuroplasticity. Our brains have evolved to notice differences in our environment: it’s how we’re alerted to predators, to potential danger. To be sensitive to change, then, is to ensure survival.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“When he took my hand he taught me something about the value of touch, the communicative power of the human hand. I didn't know, as I lay there, that I would think of him many times in the years ahead. When my son lay on a hospital bed, age four, with the raging fever of meningitis, I reached through the bodies of the attending doctors and held his slack, heated hand in both of mine. When my youngest child disappeared beneath the waves of the Mediterranean Sea and I had to leap in, haul her out, turn her upside-down so that the water drained from her lungs. Then all she and I could do was sit on the sand, wrapped in towels, contemplating what had almost happened, her small fingers wrapped in mine.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children. There is something at-loose-ends feeling about such a woman. What is she going to do instead? What sort of trouble will she make?”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood