The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.

honestly—neither party is great these days, and when you personalize something to the extent many people do in politics, any time anyone questions something the party does, it can feel like they’re questioning you, and that’s just plain unhealthy.

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath.

You can tell yourself you don’t even really want to be wanted by people like them anyway, but it isn’t true because the same way parents are supposed to want their kids, kids have a genetic predisposition to want to be wanted by them.

after about a month, before I’d see him, I’d feel tired. Like, I knew what I was getting into before we got into it. And we’d get into it, fall into it like a dance. We’d have peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs and peaks. We always ended on a peak; it’s why we’d keep coming back to each other.

My mom is like a bee flittering between flowers, too buzzy and busy to slow down or stop, and I think it’s on purpose to avoid feeling what she’s feeling. My mother doesn’t have the capacity to be weak in front of people; she’ll be together until it kills her and she’ll finally fall apart in death.

I don’t like my mom. I never really have, not for a long time, and you’ll get it eventually. It sounds callous to say it now out of context, but context is everything. I love her, sure—an abstract love that stems from a place sadder and deeper and more desperate for acceptance than I care to acknowledge exists within me, but I don’t particularly like her.

There are a lot of kinds of love in the world, and not all of them make sense all of the time.

See, Oliver loved me so much—too much, you might even say—that he’d rather leave me hurting if it meant it hurt me less at the time.

But elastic wears over time. It stretches more, gets thinner, loses its shape. Even when you want it to snap back to what it was, it doesn’t always work like that.

And once I began to, it became easier and easier to keep doing it.

I understand now that I’m older that it takes a true and deep faith in God to feel comfortable enough to ask and be asked such questions, but I don’t think many people like the depths. The deeper you go, the darker it gets, but I once knew a guy who said there are shadows to his wisdom.