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1 week ago | 
yale-herald.com | Madison Butchko
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1 week ago | 
yaledailynews.com | Madison Butchko
I. “Everyone is adopted,” I announced to my kindergarten class on the first day of school. To 5-year-old me, this was as normal as sharing your birthday or favorite color. After school, I spotted Prudence with her little brother, Miles. Their identical shade of brown curls and slightly tanned skin caught my eye. “The agency did a great job matching you two,” I observed. When Prudence’s mother frowned, I explained that all families were created through careful selection.
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2 weeks ago | 
yale-herald.com | Madison Butchko
At eight, when I started playing piano, I saw music before I understood it. I didn’t memorize notes—I followed them as they unfolded into landscapes, shifting through shades and seasons. At twelve, Frédéric Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu was a fairytale I painted with my fingers. Melodies moved in hues. I lived in color. Fantaisie-Impromptu’s fast opening section looked like a storm of dark blues—navy, indigo, and obsidian swirling together.
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2 weeks ago | 
yaledailynews.com | Madison Butchko
Madison Butchko We move through life collecting thoughts, moments and feelings. Some we dwell on, others we let pass without a second thought. But certain things linger, pressing at the edges of our awareness, asking to be reconsidered. “On Second Thought” is where I return to those musings — the overlooked, the uncertain, the unresolved — to give them the attention they deserve.
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3 weeks ago | 
yale-herald.com | Madison Butchko
First, the oil cleanser: cold-pressed, unrefined, harvested from olives grown on a Grecian estate. It melts away makeup, sunscreen, and the day’s invisible grime. Massage in clockwise circles for ninety seconds—any less and dirt stays trapped in pores, any more and essential lipids are stripped away. The oil turns from clear to milky white as it emulsifies. Then, the foaming cleanser: 4.5 pH, fragrance-free, with ceramides and hyaluronic acid. Two pumps dispensed onto fingertips warmed between palms.
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3 weeks ago | 
yaledailynews.com | Madison Butchko
Maddie Butchko As a child, I believed smart people read books instead of watching movies. I thought movies were just mindless screen-staring, while books required thinking and engagement with classics. I read constantly through late elementary and middle school, priding myself on my growing stack of novels as proof of intellect. This changed recently as I found myself constantly retreating to bed. My body felt trapped by something heavier than normal fatigue.
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1 month ago | 
yaledailynews.com | Madison Butchko
We move through life collecting thoughts, moments and feelings. Some we dwell on, others we let pass without a second thought. But certain things linger, pressing at the edges of our awareness, asking to be reconsidered. “On Second Thought” is where I return to those musings — the overlooked, the uncertain, the unresolved — to give them the attention they deserve. My name is Madison Butchko, and this column is a space for reflection, for pulling apart the thoughts that resist easy answers.
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1 month ago | 
yaledailynews.com | Madison Butchko
The world hums. The sharp exhale of breath, the rhythmic slap of my sneakers against pavement, the distant honk of a car. A shopping cart rattles over uneven sidewalk, the low murmur of two students scurrying to class, the rustling of wind through skeletal branches. I hear it all in fragments. My mind registers noise — nothing more. Every Friday afternoon, I go on long runs through New Haven.
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1 month ago | 
yaledailynews.com | Madison Butchko
Maddie Butchko I’ll be upfront with you. I won’t hide it, the way I used to hide my elementary school crushes. I’ve been assigned to write about love. As if I’m qualified. Don’t worry, I have some credentials. Yes, I’ve been in love. I’ve dated, I’ve cried over exes far too much and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time staring at my phone, waiting for a text that was never coming.
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2 months ago | 
yaledailynews.com | Madison Butchko
Madison Butchko I will confess that I’m writing this article because I was struggling to write one—so, naturally, I decided to write about the struggle itself. A form of meta-procrastination. If nothing else, writing about the struggle to write is still writing. This semester, I told myself I would become a better writer. I came in buoyant, eager, believing that simply writing more would, by some natural process, make me better. At first, it was an invitation—open-ended, full of possibility.
