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Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”
Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.
Joan felt like a moth that knew what a flame could do to it.
the natural consequences of our connections to each other—that’s God, to me. I believe in it because I can see it with my own eyes. I know it exists. But I also believe in it because I want to believe in it. I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?”
Supposedly, children are resilient. But Joan suspected this was merely something we tell ourselves because we are terrified they are just as delicate as we are.
“I would give you anything,” Vanessa said, “if it wasn’t going to cost us everything.” “I would never ask it,” Joan said, shaking her head. Her tears began to fall, and she dried them. “Which is how I know that you’d be worth giving it to,” Vanessa said.
God, Joan’s entire life she’d been asking that question, hadn’t she? Was she okay? She had been looking around every room she was in to survey the people around her, compare herself to the way she saw them, trying to gauge where she didn’t fit, trying to find where she could. Trying to see if she was okay. And she was.
Joan marveled at how easy Barbara’s inner life must be. How entirely undemanding of yourself it was to believe that everything happened to you. And everything was about you. And that your feelings were the only ones that mattered. Worse yet, to afford yourself the role of the victim always—regardless of how grotesquely it required you to twist reality—so that you never had to look in the mirror and admit you were the perpetrator.
When Vanessa gets home, Joan is going to scream at her with such venom she might go hoarse. Then she will fall into her and sob. But for now, she will be the CAPCOM Vanessa Ford needs. She can do that for her. She has to do that for her. It is the only real way to love her.
