“I envy happy people,” says Zaleekhah. “Not in a jealous way—it’s more that I’m puzzled by them. I want to study them—put them under a microscope like a specimen. How do they even do it? Whereas I’m always off-balance.” Nen offers Zaleekhah half of her orange. She says when we look at a person all we see in that moment is a partial image of them, often subconsciously biased. They appear successful and content, and so we conclude there must be something wrong with us, since we cannot be more like them. But that image is not the full reality and nor are we that simple or static. “We are all like
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