As he slumped into the comfy chair, too tired to move or do much of anything other than sit, a song came on the radio. It was a song he had heard many a time before, but never really listened to. Now, in his present state of utter tiredness, the defenses usually mustered by familiarity were nowhere to be seen, and thus he took it all in as if for the first time. And so it came to pass that he realized what he had until now assumed was a jaunty little ditty, was in fact an in-depth explanation of how having a womb worked and malfunctioned. Transfixed, this new knowledge flooded into him, changing his life trajectory forever

She was stressed out of her mind. In five hours, it was time to go, and she had things to do before then. Having planned it all out the day before, she knew it’d take two and a half hours to do the things, three tops if something came up. She’d even divided it all into neat, timestamped subactivities. Which, somehow, only served to make her even more stressed; stacked together, those individual activities stretched out far longer than the time remaining. Thus, at the appointed hour, she had rushed only the bare minimum, now running to catch the train

It had been a long, arduous struggle, but it was finally done. The text she had written was literally the worst piece of wordsmithing she’d (or anyone’d) had ever done, but it was in fact unequivocally done, and that’s what counts. With the thought that being done is a decision, and not an objective state of things in the world, she turned it in, and went to sleep

Three weeks later, her text was graded. A+. Running through the emotional stages – shock, denial, negotiation, acceptance, joy – at record pace, she then did something unexpected. She took pride in her work