Let's Pretend This Will Work

by Maddie Dawson

“WE GROW OUR OWN KIDS.” It’s a very important point, they tell me, to realize that experts don’t have all the knowledge about your own dear child.

life is what happens when you don’t know what you’re really doing, so this is what we’re doing now .

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.”

Are we always doomed to be bumped around by people who claim they know what’s right for us?

Maybe conflict doesn’t mean that love is dead. Maybe sometimes it means it’s alive.

So there you have it; he said that’s the way a marriage crumbles, in little slights, arguments, cold stares, distances, hatred.

I hate how every time I’m angry, it comes off as tearful.

“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.”

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.”

When can I be confident enough to get a man who is unencumbered, who just wants me? Is it too much to ask that I be first in some guy’s heart?

But how can things work out if we’re both being so careful with our hearts? Seems to me that somebody’s got to throw their heart into the air and see how it lands.

“If you’re going to freak out over every little apparent setback in your life, you’re not going to enjoy life as much as you could be,” she says and actually laughs. “How about you just try to remember that it’s all going to work out, and don’t sweat the details. Just sit back and be curious, why don’t you?”

I can’t seem to sugarcoat things. Everything’s just kind of rolling along, I guess, always at a slight deficit. Work, school, project. Then meals, bedtime, more work after everybody else is asleep. The basic grind of life, of trying to get everything done.

I have to go onto the balcony and look out at the tall buildings and the lights and take deep breaths so I can remember who I am.

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.

it hits me how hard people try to make things go right, and how scared they are—we are.

how necessary it is to believe in the power of coincidences. And serendipity.

The truth, as told by La Starla, is that the path you’re on may simply be a little detour that leads you to the real path you’re supposed to be on, where all your happiness is hanging out, waiting for you.

concentrate on magic and the universe and the incredible miracles that wait for us around every corner if we just have the sense to look for them and pay attention.

he was a man who somehow knew how to unearth the real me, which was not easy since I was a woman who spent all of her time trying to be what everyone else wanted her to be.