Introvale is a State of Mind

Green letter M logo of Medium.comI’ve been hearing buzz about Medium here and there for awhile now. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a newish online sharing platform meant for deeper, more thoughtful articles and responses than social media and commercial sharing venues typically offer.

Social “Medium” for Introverts

That sounds like something designed by (and for) introverts, no?

But I’ve been scrambling to make financial ends at least wave at each other from opposite ends of the block, so it wasn’t until tonight that I finally took a look.

I didn’t look far before I found Multitasking is Killing Your Brain. Hah! I was right! It’s a den of introverts! Here I was thinking Introvale was a physical space. Silly me.

A straight road across a wooded plain appears intermittently between the trees

Depression Inside Out

There are many depictions of non-usual mental states in story and song, including some excellent first-person representations of mental disorders. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, is famous for his accounts of psychotic breaks in the first person. Sometimes we know we are witnessing “madness,” as Poe called it, but sometimes these descriptions are framed as something else. Continue reading

Listening Underneath

When I was in my teens, I became aware that I experienced a certain kind of connection with some people, but not with others. When I met someone, I “listened underneath” (as I thought of it), and if I couldn’t perceive them that way, was unlikely to feel that we had much in common.

I had forgotten all about listening underneath until recently. Continue reading