Hello, Sunshine

by Laura Dave

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made. —Groucho Marx

She was the typical caretaking firstborn. She tried to help him keep everything intact.

On the other hand, I was the second born. And I tried to do everything I could to mess with his rules, to show him they didn’t add up to anything useful.

“I’m saying it’s the way of the world now to display yourself. And there is no putting that genie back in the bottle,”

I’d been wrong about the ways we move past the versions of ourselves that no longer fit. I’d thought it involved running, as far and as fast as your feet could carry you, from your former selves. I didn’t understand that was the surest way to wind up exactly where you started.

Maybe that was the thing about regret. Once you felt it, you went out on a limb to try and feel anything else.

No one without a soul can sell authenticity the way you did.

I’d told the story about myself that I thought needed to be told. Until it had taken me so far away from myself that I couldn’t even find it anymore. The truth.

Maybe that was all we had to hold on to. Our truth. Our thing. The thing that made us who we were.

I was still trying to figure out what we all lost in broadcasting our lives for everyone else’s consumption.

what we should pay attention to instead. About taking a hard look at what we are willing to throw away, about what we should be letting it show us.