Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

I was wrong about everything. For twenty-four hours, those words sat inside me like a second incision, deeper than the one across my abdomen. A nurse’s offhand comment had turned every late meeting, every unread message from David into evidence of imagined betrayal, and I’d lain in that hospital bed replaying thirty-one years of marriage…

I’d always believed bad behavior eventually sent you a bill. I just never expected my sister to make billing our 79-year-old mother the reason I started believing it. Six months into chemotherapy, some days I could barely make it from bed to the bathroom. My ridiculous coping mechanism was narrating bad moments like a sports…

Just a joke. No hard feelings! A woman’s husband had been slipping in and out of a coma for several months, yet she had stayed by his bedside every single day. One day, when he came to, he motioned for her to come nearer. As she sat by him, he whispered, eyes full of tears,…

The homeless man I married drank his coffee black outside my subway stop. After his funeral, his last letter opened with an apology I couldn’t understand and sent me back to the courthouse. There, a clerk opened a record book, found his name on hundreds of pages, and asked which Larry I had married. “Sarah,…

After my husband died, our eight-year-old daughter stopped caring about the football team they used to watch together. So when she finally wanted to go to a game, I saved for months to make it happen. I thought the hardest part would be getting through the day without him. My eight-year-old daughter, Kelly, learned football…

My first thought was that Nolan had written those words himself. But something about the handwriting bothered me. It wasn’t childish. The letters were too neat. Too deliberate. And the pressure of the marker was heavy, almost as if whoever had written it had been angry or frightened. I picked up the box again. It…

A priest offered a Nun a lift. She got in and crossed her legs, forcing her gown to reveal a leg. The priest nearly had an accident. After controlling the car, he stealthily slid his hand up her leg. The nun said, “Father, remember Psalm 129?” The priest removed his hand. But, changing gears, he…

My husband had called it discipline. His mother had called it a lesson. But when I looked at the torn piece of paper in the detective’s hand, I finally understood that the broken glass my daughter had dropped was never the real reason any of this had happened. It had simply given them an excuse.…

I walked out of the forty-five-thousand-dollar kitchen I had designed and paid for, leaving it behind like a crime scene, suitcase handle cutting into my palm while my husband stood there in his socks, stripped of the comforting script he’d relied on for so long. He didn’t reach for me, didn’t tell me he loved…

I held Edward’s phone in my own kitchen and read the message out loud—“Can’t stop thinking about last weekend”—while he leaned against the counter, arms folded, as if I were the one on trial. The affair, the hotel confirmations, the months of messages with a woman named Vanessa almost twenty years younger than him: they…