Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily. He nodded, looking at me. I did, he said. I just thought it would be worth it.

Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.

I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would.

Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.

Am I myself, or am I them?

Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.

By refusing to admit that I was sick, I felt I could keep the sickness outside time and space, something only in my own head. If other people knew about it, the sickness would become real and I would have to spend my life being a sick person. This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl.

You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.