On Going Viral and Blackbirds

Empathy is only toxic when we can't find it in ourselves at all

In my freshman year of college, I was 24 years old, fresh off the plane from having lived in Central America and gotten terribly sick. The world when I came back to the exact same place I’d left six months earlier felt at the same time brighter and also more terrible than I imagined.

While I was bent over the toilet in my Guatemalan cinderblock garage be…