My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn’t concern me.

all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I’d let Reva borrow,

I looked like a model, had money I hadn’t earned,

I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.

The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.”

your mind is too porous.

Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.

My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.

time off and think about your next move. Oprah says we women rush into decisions because we don’t have faith that something better will ever come along.

learned to float on cheap affections gleaned from other people’s insecurities.

on about how “it’s all about your attitude,” and that “positive thinking is more powerful than negative thinking, even in equal amounts.”

“manifesting your own reality.”

“Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?”

behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heart-break and indignity.

guess I just never felt good enough.