My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.

She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but I found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence.

Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.

Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned, having gone to Columbia.

anxieties over them amplified the volume of my thoughts,

I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day.

I asked Trevor once, “If you could have only blow jobs or only intercourse for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?” “Blow jobs,” he answered. “That’s kind of gay, isn’t it?” I said. “To be more interested in mouths than pussies?” He didn’t speak to me for weeks.

“debilitating fatigue due to emotional weakness, plus insomnia, resulting in soft psychosis and belligerence.”

was more of a somniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping.

I was born in August 1973, seven months after Roe v. Wade.

It was ten at night and everyone had gone home. I trudged up the dark stairway to clean out my desk. There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing.

I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. 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.

I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world.

REVA WAS ONLY a week older than me. On August 20, 2000, I turned twenty-seven

I left school and took the train up to see him the very next day, not because I thought it would mean so much to him to have me there, but to prove to my mother that I was a better person than she was: I was willing to be inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering.

Her smile turned a little phony. “You know, I don’t think you can use ‘condole’ that way. I think you can ‘condole with’ someone. But you can’t ‘condole’ someone.” “No, Reva. I’m not condoling you. The necklace is.” “But that’s not the right word, I think. You can console someone.” “No, you can’t,” I said. “Anyway, you know what I mean.”

Maggie Kahpour’s father had owned the largest private collection of Picasso doodles in the world, and when he died, she donated them to an abbey in the south of France. The monks named a cheese after her.

We may need to rethink our approach to your treatment in general,” she said. “There are alternatives to medication, though they tend to have more disruptive side effects.” “Like what?” “Have you ever been in love?”