Gifted and Neurodivergent: Why You Can't Stop Correcting the People You Love (Essay)

Have you ever been asked to tell your life story and not known where to start? Perhaps your work history does not show one clear career, or a therapist has asked you to connect your past to your present and you find that awkward. You may have concluded that something is wrong with you. Many of us are told that a psychologically healthy person can tell a coherent story about their life: where they came from, what shaped them, and where they are heading. In this video I discuss the philosopher...

We spend much of our lives constructing a sense of who we are, and then defending it. In this episode, I read from my essay on emptiness and the self, covering Jung's account of identity at midlife, the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination, and the difference between the Buddhist meaning of emptiness and the clinical experience of feeling empty. PS- The Buddhist sense of emptiness discussed here is distinct from the clinical experience of chronic emptiness, which deserves proper suppor...

Most of us who live with intensity have spent years being told we are too much. Too emotional, too fast, too deep. And because we heard it so often, we learned to shrink, to soften everything we say in advance, and to treat our own nature as a problem that needed managing. In this episode I am the guest. Diann Wingert, a former psychotherapist turned business strategist for entrepreneurs with ADHD, interviewed me on her show, the ADHD-ish™ Podcast, where this conversation was first released a...

https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/08/27/travis/ Many intense people have a high level of moral sensitivity. I wrote about this elsewhere before, but basically, they see something cruel or careless and cannot just move on from it the way other people seem to. They often lie awake thinking about whether they are doing enough, whether what they are doing even counts, and whether there is any point in trying when the world does not seem to care whether they try or not. They hold thems...

https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/07/30/frank/ If you have searched for help with anxiety or overthinking, YouTube has probably offered you ten Stoic principles that will change your life, or Taoism explained as going with the flow, sometimes in an approximation of Alan Watts's voice. My guest is Frank P. Saunders Jr., a philosopher who works on Chinese thought and who has spent the past couple of years making videos about philosophy and public philosophy. We began with McSt...