Everything feels like it’s too much—I know I’m not alone here—and at the edges of this too muchness is a gnawing loneliness, an isolation so acute, it’s tugging my hair at the nape, trying to yank me toward depression.

But, I’m pushing back.

Mainly by over-indulging in good-for-me content, a healthier avenue to numb and distract myself from the horrors of the world, and the downfall of America.

Here are a few things I’ve been consuming that I think you might appreciate.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

In 1957, at the age of eighty-one, Carl Jung began writing the story of his life.

The result is less a conventional autobiography than a psychological and philosophical memoir—a rich excavation of his inner world. Jung traces his early childhood, his break with Freud, and the evolution of his theories on the unconscious, archetypes, and the symbolic language of dreams. The tone is often mystical.

Rather than cataloging external achievements, the book offers an intimate tour through the landscape of Jung’s psyche—a life within a life—marked by depth, insight, and the uncanny feeling of inhabiting someone else’s inner world.

At the Existentialist Cafe

Sarah Blakewell is an absolute genius. I love everything she writes. This book is wonderful, and I’m reading it AND listening to it—a sublime experience.

This is a breezy, colloquial book, that places you at the cafe, and in conversation with Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others. It’s both an education and a reality show. How refreshing to read about men falling out with each other! Part slam book, catty gossip sesh and a tour through modern intellectual history. It’s deeply absorbing.

Charlotte Salomon

I recently spent a week writing at my aunt and uncle’s house in Concord, MA. They have the most incredible book collection. When I wasn’t writing, I was pouring over the wonders in their bookshelves, and came across this artist, whose name was faintly recognizable.

Charlotte Salomon was a German-Jewish artist who created the largest known body of work by a Jewish person who died in the Holocaust. While in hiding from the Nazis, and over the course of a year and a half, she made 769 autobiographical paintings, a series she called Life? or Theater?

But these weren’t just paintings, they were a fantastic and often fantastical retelling of the significant events of her life, the rise of Nazism, her mother’s suicide, her sexually abusive grandfather, and much more. In addition, she added notes about the type of music to play that might increase the dramatic effect of the work. It was theater through visual art.

Before she was murdered in Auschwitz, at age 26, and four or five months pregnant, she gave her entire body of work to a local doctor asking him to keep the contents safe. He did.

Fantasie Negre

I have dedicated playlists for nearly every activity: painting, walking, writing, crying, getting ready, brooding, cooking…you name it.

This has been the first song on my writing playlist for almost two years now, and it’s not going anywhere. There are many other songs from this album on the writing playlists, but this first one sets the stage, tone and energy for my writing time.

I love it. I think you will too.

And you? What are you reading, looking at, listening to? Tell me in the comments!

Until next week, I will remain…