You’re Gonna Die Alone (& Other Excellent News)

by Devrie Donalson

The things we pack away wait for us to come back to them, unchanging while we carry on being human.

It makes me tired because I’m not intimidating. They are intimidated. That’s very different.

The basics of what we find attractive are pretty simple when you think about it. Radical authenticity requires courage. So does falling in love.

“There is so much gray to sift through, and there are no easy answers. I do the best I can with the information I have, I honor the limits of my mind and body, and I choose with the intention of doing the most good for the most people.

We project the things we want to control and critique about ourselves onto each other.

Imagine, for a minute, a world in which no one fucking cared what women looked like. Imagine a world where the older a woman looked, the more sought after she became. We would crave her wit, her wisdom, her sacred knowledge, her presence in her body, her mastery of self—following after her in the hope that we might learn from her valuable experience.

So let’s get together and burn the celebrity gossip magazines in a righteous bonfire, and dance naked under the moonlight, all mud and sweat and shrieks, until the word gets out and we inspire new rumors of witches in the woods. Let’s do what we can to make a world of beauty, safety, and brilliance for everyone. Let’s do what we can to make sure we all make it.

Learning that you are not the person you believed yourself to be can be so disastrous to our psyches that we cannot face it when it first comes to us as truth.

I treat myself like this: I forgive myself for what I did when I did not know any better. I offer myself grace and compassion, and I do what I can to apologize to the people I hurt along my path.