When I ask people what “being alive” means, they lay out a multifaceted experience. Power, validation, confidence, and freedom are the most common flavors. Add to these the elixir of love, and you have an intoxicating cocktail. There is the sexual awakening or reawakening, of course, but it doesn’t stop there. The awakened describe a sense of movement when they had felt constricted, an opening up of possibilities in a life that had narrowed down to a single predictable path, a surge of emotional intensity where everything seemed bland. I have come to think of encounters like these as
...more
