My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

The worst was that those guys tried to pass off their insecurity as “sensitivity,” and it worked.

The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.”

I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.