Author: The Kate Awakening

The Discernment Test

All We Need is Just a Little

The Universe Keeps Receipts

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Help me pick the next book for Book Club!

The Great Awakening isn’t just about waking up to the corruption in the world.

Call me negative, but I don’t think anyone is looking out at the state of humanity, whether by window or screen, and thinking to themselves, “Ah, yes. Perfect.” One thing we could all probably collectively agree on is that society is broken. (Yay, unity?) And because of this fracturing, it’s pretty hard for anyone to be happy.

To say life is hard is like saying the ocean is a little damp, the universe is big, or eternity’s a bit lengthy. There’s no doubt that suffering is intrinsic to and inseparable from being a human being on earth. We can’t escape it. Even people with seemingly the best circumstances experience pain and suffering.

Four years ago today, I was “Qed.” That means the infamous anonymous poster on the message boards (8chan) shared one of my tweets. I get asked about the context of this tweet a lot because I was quote tweeting someone else (@snyder1_r) and his tweet has since been deleted because he was banned from Twitter.

The Kate Awakening is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone that has haunted me since childhood. In it, Henry Bemis, an average dude with a mundane life but a deep passion for reading, faces a harrowing fate that still chills me to the core. He loved reading so much, in fact, that the real world and human interactions were, to him, just nuisances he had to deal with until he could get back to the warm embrace of his books. He even began to detest his wife, his boss, and his fellow man for being the obstacles keeping him from spending his every moment reading. One day, while eating lunch inside the vault of the bank where he works, an H-bomb is detonated, you know, as will happen from time to time. The bank vault has kept Henry safe, but when he emerges, he realizes there are no other survivors. At first he is overcome with grief and readies to kill himself with a revolver he finds. Just as he’s just about to pull the trigger, though, he sees the ruins of a public library off in the distance. Henry is beside himself. Finally, all the books he can read, and not a single person left to distract him. All his sorrows about being the last man on earth are at once replaced with pure joy and excitement. Can you guess what happens next?