Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

“You are locked in a prison of your own nostalgia. You need to let go of the past.”

I can already see how retrospect is going to give that time a different atmosphere than was there in the actual living of it.

It’s like I was off sick from life for a while, and sometimes it’s nice to be off sick. Sometimes it’s nice to not be a thing, in the world, trying so desperately to be a person.

Because I am starting to think that talking about the sadness might be the same thing as processing the sadness. And if we’re not doing that, then we only have our thoughts for company, and our thoughts are unreliable and they invent things and they lie to us and give bad advice. Not talking about the sadness is what leads us into The Madness.

Feeling the absence of someone’s company and the absence of their love are two different things. I wish I’d known that earlier.