In “The White Album,” Joan Didion connects her own nervous breakdown to the cultural disorder around her: the arrest of Huey Newton, the unfolding of the Manson Murder trials, what she calls an “authentically senseless chain of correspondences.” She makes links but she refuses to flatten these links into an easy moral; she wants them to remain provocative but “senseless.” In “No Man’s Land,” Eula Biss positions a personal account of her own Chicago neighborhood inside several larger contexts:...

In “The White Album,” Joan Didion connects her own nervous breakdown to the cultural disorder around her: the arrest of Huey Newton, the unfolding of the Manson Murder trials, what she calls an “authentically senseless chain of correspondences.” She makes links but she refuses to flatten these links into an easy moral; she wants them to remain provocative but “senseless.” In “No Man’s Land,” Eula Biss positions a personal account of her own Chicago neighborhood inside several larger contexts:...

Thank you for this article. As a hospice nurse, I seem to walk that tight rope everyday with patients and co-workers. Heck as a nurse I walk this line everyday. As many have mentioned, the past/childhood seems to be where this issue to please people begins. I felt I was never heard as a child especially after my dad died. Then we moved to a new neighborhood and school and it all went down hill from there due to kids making fun of me and my mother coming home drunk after work just about every...

Thank you for this article. As a hospice nurse, I seem to walk that tight rope everyday with patients and co-workers. Heck as a nurse I walk this line everyday. As many have mentioned, the past/childhood seems to be where this issue to please people begins. I felt I was never heard as a child especially after my dad died. Then we moved to a new neighborhood and school and it all went down hill from there due to kids making fun of me and my mother coming home drunk after work just about every...

The big problem was that, as a twenty-something college graduate entering the work force, I felt that anything I did or even thought only had validity if it was the “right thing” to say and think.  And by “right thing,” what I really mean is “what other people thought was right.”  I was terrified to step outside the box of acceptability – which was especially harmful to my creativity as I tried to nurture my passion for writing and blogging.