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The fear of how you are seen, the fear of what you are, is solved by accepting it all the way: you are seen in all possible ways at all times, which means you really are all possible beings at all times.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”

Accepting the reality that there is no cure for our existential malaise keeps us from wasting our life in chasing the untenable goal of healing our lack. That is, accepting the lack of a definitive cure allows us to direct our attention to endeavors over which we have some control; it frees us to pursue modalities of living that are both realistically attainable and potentially even rewarding—gratifying despite being imperfect. Unfortunately, because the mundane objects that contain the objet a are by necessity mere pale imitations of the Thing-in-itself, it can take prolonged mourning to reconcile ourselves to the reality that these imitations, these faint echoes of the Thing, are the only portion of the Thing that will ever be available to us. Yet I believe that those of us who have managed to make peace with this reality possess the best chances for fashioning a life that feels both rewarding and dynamic.