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October 23 - October 31, 2018
The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.
Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.
We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.
Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away.
Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.
When I say you don’t have to explain what you’re going to do with your life, I’m not suggesting you lounge around whining about how difficult it is. I’m suggesting you apply yourself in directions for which we have no accurate measurement. I’m talking about work. And love.
you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.
That both things could be true at once—my disbelief as well as my certainty—was the unification of the ancient and the future parts of me. It was everything I intended and yet still I was surprised by what I got.
If you had to give one piece of advice to people in their twenties, what would it be? To go to a bookstore and buy ten books of poetry and read them each five times.
Because in your twenties you’re becoming who you’re going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. Also, because it’s harder to be magnanimous when you’re in your twenties, I think, and so that’s why I’d like to remind you of it. You’re generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here to Serve button has been eternally pinned.
I want love and I’m afraid I’ll never get it.
“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don’t need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don’t have to be broken for me.”
It had never before occurred to me that I thought in order to get a man to love me I had to appear to be broken for him. And yet when he said it, I recognized it—immediately, humiliatingly—as true. Like truly-uly true. Like how-could-I-have-not-known-this-about-myself-before true. Like what-hole-can-I-go-and-die-in-now true. Because here was a man—a good, strong, sexy, kind, astounding, miraculous man—finally calling my bluff.
We’re all going to die, but only some of us are going to die tomorrow or next year or in the next half century. And, by and large, we don’t know which of us it will be, when, and of what.
