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.

The Romantics believed in the correspondence between inner and outer nature, the idea that what we feel matches what the world is. But I think there is something more interesting happening here: a correspondence between who we practice being and who we might become. My son has been practicing courage, practicing resilience, practicing a relationship to failure that allows forward motion. And in that practice, he has become someone I did not know to hope for.

I am thinking about what it means to trust another person's unfolding, to resist the urge to reshape them according to cultural templates of success. The negative capability that Keats described (the capacity to dwell in mystery and uncertainty) turns out to be a parental skill as essential as any other.

What I have come to want from poems about love (when I want them at all) is not the architecture of longing but the archaeology of actual connection. Not the moment of falling but the long, unglamorous work of remaining. Not the beloved as muse, mirror, or metaphor, but as the irreducible mystery that another consciousness always is.

We do not have a generous vocabulary for such pauses in adult life. We call them sabbaticals if we're lucky, breakdowns if we're honest, unemployment if we're unlucky. What we almost never call them is ‘necessary.’ A word we reserve for childhood education, for sleep, for the predictable milestones of career advancement. But what if the adult gap year, that deliberate stepping out of the current that carries most of us from college graduation to retirement without pause, is not an aberration but a requirement? What if our lives, like fields, need to lie fallow? What if interruption isn't the opposite of accomplishment but its prerequisite?

A year ago I stopped teaching journaling workshops because I no longer knew what I was teaching. Now I think I'm beginning to understand, though understanding feels like the wrong word? It's more like recognition, the way you might recognise someone you've been walking beside for years without quite looking at their face.

Our visible veins represent a kind of involuntary honesty. The body refusing to conceal its inner workings. As Adrienne Rich wrote of "the thing itself and not the myth," our veins are precisely this: evidence that the body, unlike the mind, cannot lie indefinitely. It tells the truth about time, about fragility, about the liquid machinery that keeps us alive.

Consider what else the body reveals without our permission: the flush of emotion rising in our cheeks, tears that spring to our eyes before we can stop them, the way our voice breaks when we speak of something that matters. We are, whether we like it or not, transparent creatures. Our biology insists on honesty even when our psychology does not.