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Then, at the memory, something like tenderness lit his expression. He gave a little shrug. “You were a joy.”
“Here’s a hypothetical question,” she said next. “If there’s a five percent chance something bad will happen, and a ninety-five percent chance that things will be fine, which one is more likely?”
“Our thoughts create our emotions. So if you fixate on your worst-case scenario, you’ll make things harder for yourself.”
“Try to step back and look at the big picture,” Dr. Nicole said. “That’s where you can see it more clearly.” “See what?” “That no matter what happens, you will find a way to be okay—
I was, as always, completely, utterly, astonishingly okay—
so-gorgeous-he-doesn’t-even-need-a-face husband,
“I really suspect that the worst possible choice is to not even try.”
“What does the life you want look like?”
“Seeming okay and being okay are not the same thing.”
“You’ll definitely keep thinking that if you keep thinking that.”
“I was kind of mesmerized, to be honest.”
Then he said, “You’ve still got your roller skates on.”
Maybe life was full of surprises. Maybe disappointments could turn out to be blessings.
Joe looked up at the sound of my voice and then stilled at the sight of me.
I could feel Joe’s relief at what I was doing. I could feel how grateful he was. It was palpable. His tension eased. His breath slowed.
“My whole life, my brain was always just so . . . reliable. But now, not as much. I keep getting things wrong. I can’t trust myself. The whole world looks different. And so the version of me that you’re getting right now is . . . kind of a mess. Much more of a mess than usual.”
“What if you just capture your story—right now—as it is. I’d give anything to see that.”
The world had been so hard to read lately.
“I think I just . . . accidentally . . . fell madly in love.”
Every real human interaction is made up of a million tiny moving pieces. Not a simple one-note situation: a symphony of cues to read and decipher and evaluate and pay attention to.
But I’m not okay, Joe. That’s the truth. I’m absolutely, astonishingly . . . not okay right now. And I don’t even know sometimes what okay even is.
Seeing the world differently helps you see things not just that other people can’t—but that you yourself never could if you weren’t so lucky. It lets you make your own rules. Color outside your own lines. Allow yourself another way of seeing.
Because that really might be the truest thing I’ll ever know: The more good things you look for, the more you find.
The anticipation—the blissful, delicious, oxytocin-laden, yearning-infused, building sense of anticipation—is the point.
Because tragedy is a given, but joy is a choice.
That believing in love is believing in hope. And
