Let's Pretend This Will Work

by Maddie Dawson

Trying too hard never works with young people. They need to be treated like hostile, dangerous jungle cats who will slash you if you so much as make uninvited eye contact.

The whole world feels like it has a big hole in it, and that we’re all living in the aftermath of a horrible accident.

“Also, may I just go on the record as saying that other people don’t get to run your life, no matter how much they love you or how supposedly nice they are. You get to run your life.”

“Well, I just think that when that first love comes along, it brings with it a huge thunderclap of feeling—something so amazing that we get overwhelmed with it. And that it’s tempting to think that it’s the only love there ever could be in the world. But then it ends. Most of the time it ends. And then, a long time later, we look back and see that that whole experience of love was just a little kiddie pool we were paddling around in. And that actually a really huge ocean awaits us.” “Wow,”

“Oh, we’re all scared of the ocean. Every single one of us. But here’s what I think: if you had married this dude, you would have eventually found out about the ocean anyway, and you would have started to hate him for keeping you in that little kiddie pool. I think that when you see bitter people out in the world, people who’ve been married for forty years and they tell you that love isn’t really real, that it never works out, those are the people who settled for the kiddie pool, and it dried up, and they never knew what was really out there for them. Saddest thing in the world.”

She wasn’t my first love, but she was my ocean, the stars, and all the sea turtles.”

But this is just what being in a relationship means. Everybody knows this. It takes patience and sacrifice. You feel misunderstood sometimes. You feel alone even when you’re with the person who means the most to you. You just smile, and you go on. It’s life. And life has tradeoffs.

I’m not going to say that everything happens for a reason, but I will say that there is plenty that we don’t understand about life.

if you’re expecting love to look like it was designed by Hollywood, while meanwhile you’re pretzeling yourself into meeting somebody else’s expectations, good luck to you. You might just miss what your heart truly yearns for.

because I understood something I didn’t know before—how grief and love can show up in the same moment and be quite comfortable together.