There is often someone in every family, every office, every system, who carries what others cannot: tension, contradiction, shadow. Quiet, measured, almost invisible, they absorb the unspoken, remember what others forget, and navigate the world with an acute attentiveness born of necessity. They are the designated devils whose labour shapes relationships, organisations, and even societies. To notice them is to recognise the invisible currents that sustain our lives, and to wonder what might shift if we finally acknowledged the work that holds the world together.

Cathy Rentzenbrink's Write It All Down promises solace through memoir writing, but beneath the therapeutic framing lies something older: the basic practice of sustained attention to your own experience. This review excavates what survives the self-help overlay. The craft instruction, the honest admission that writing remains difficult, and the mechanics every memoirist needs. Not therapy.

Understanding the mathematics doesn't diminish the magic. If anything, it deepens it. To know that you are made of elements forged in the hearts of dying stars, that your body recapitulates four billion years of evolutionary trial and error, that your consciousness emerges from the same physical laws that govern the motion of galaxies and the decay of atoms; this doesn't reduce you. It enlarges you. You are not merely human. You are the universe concentrated into temporary form, awakened to itself for this brief interval. I find something deeply consoling in this recognition of pattern.

Instagram didn't invent food photography but it professionalised the amateur's kitchen in a way that changed something fundamental. I scroll through feeds where every breakfast looks art-directed. The bowl is ceramic and handmade. The berries are arranged with that precision that might take me ten minutes to get right. The yogurt is Greek and full-fat and from a farmer's market, and you can tell because the caption says so, but casually, like it's not a flex. My yogurt is from NTUC Fairprice. My bowl is from Daiso, eleven years old. The berries are occasionally frozen because I'm not going to the store every two days.