A young boy suffering from OCD-like symptoms grapples with self-hatred, bullying, and sexual abuse and frequently flaps his hands and constricts his throat to escape reality. His compulsions and coping mechanisms follow him through elementary school, middle school, high school, and college.

Everything all at once in word form.

A city employs people to act strangely to order to make others feel normal.

An overly sympathetic woman never allows herself room for hatred— even as her suffocating boss stalks and harasses her.

A typical nice-guy colleague with a toxically positive attitude delivers an exhortation to his colleagues about eliminating self-doubt so as to increase work performance.

A patient attends regular sessions with his psychiatrist but stubbornly refuses to tell the doctor his true thoughts.

At a monk retreat, a guilty pharmacist tries to reclaim his attention span—and take accountability for what he has done.

A bullied young girl feeds a tiger her badness to keep from exploding.

A writer chronicles his history of depression and critiques society's attitudes toward the mentally ill.

A professor of neurobiology describes to horrified police officers how he snapped under his famous physicist wife's controlling tendencies and murdered her.