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December 7 - December 8, 2022
The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.
when we dare to face the unknown, we usually discover that we have more grit and tenacity than we thought. And we often land in a place that we couldn’t even have imagined when we started out.
when we dare to listen, we remember that there is no “other,” there is only us, and what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us.
fear pervades everything: where you live, what you do for a living. You find the first solid thing, and you don’t risk going any further.
my mom had this philosophy, which was if you take someone’s money, you have to take their advice.
You can trust a human being with grief. That’s what I tell the wardens. I tell them, “Just walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.”
I’m sort of saddened by the loss of my belief in religion. It’s like leaving forever the comfort of your childhood home, suffused with the warm glows and fond memories. But I do believe we all have to grow up. It’s difficult for many. It’s unbearable to the few. But we have to see the world as it really is, and we have to stop thinking in terms of magic. As Francis would have put it, “This is a story for grown men, not a consoling tale for children.”
the certainty of my own demise, the certainty of my own death, somehow makes my life more meaningful, and I think that is as it should be.
If Patti were here to describe herself, she would say that she was fiscally frugal. But because she’s not here to defend herself, I’ll put it a different way: she was a cheapskate who refused to spend money.
the minute you let other people start to define you, you are just giving away your power.”
Samuel Jackson reads the audio book, probably his best work since Pulp Fiction.
I never understood you as a child. I didn’t get you at all, and I tried to project onto you my life and my route, and I expected you to take that exact same route. And I’m realizing that it’s not the child’s responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It’s the parent’s responsibility to learn who the child is, and I didn’t do that, and I’m sorry.”
in my twenties, I ended up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I started noticing things like poverty and racism and unconscionable injustice. And that people like me were mostly causing it. It was a huge revelation for me. I came to the conclusion that the thing I needed to do with my privilege and all the comfort that I’d had all my life was to destroy it. Rip it in half. Spit on it. Piss on it. Set it on fire.
This is what I know. In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.
And I’m thinking what a roller coaster mental illness is. Not just for the patient, but for everyone else involved. It’s a sentence that you’re given, and it’s a life sentence. And there’s all the things that you have to go through: the doctors, the drugs, the violent outbursts, the destruction (literally and emotionally), the police coming to your house, the shame that you live with. It just goes on and on. It’s not like those movies like A Beautiful Mind where someone reaches out and says, “All you need is love.” You know? Love is a given, but it’s a war of attrition. It really is. It’s a
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And I have just confessed to her that actually I’d gotten into the cupboard and eaten Red Hots. It was the only candy in our house, ever, and we used it once a year to put two eyeballs on a gingerbread man that we made.
little blue booklet called Gone From My Sight.
One of my happiest memories as a kid is staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live on this old black-and-white TV that I’d actually found in the trash area of my building and had convinced my parents to let me keep in my room. There was something so magical and exciting about when the show would start, and the theme music would play over that cool, New Yorky montage of the cast. It made me feel really hip and alive, like I was part of a cool club.
Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness—the guts, if you like—to face the fear.
I realized then that we all have a breaking point. And we can never know until we’re faced with the situation what that breaking point actually is.
I was left with a little cameo of a perfect love. Perfect, perhaps, because it had been so brief.
the world is always trying to tell you what you’re not.
Wow
As I removed the rings from my hand, my hand felt lighter and naked and really weird. And it hurt.
Then about three months ago or so, I don’t know what impulse made me do this. Just a random impulse. Curiosity. I sat down on my bed with my rings and put them back on my hand. And I held it out. And it was an alien hand. It wasn’t my hand any longer.
when you hate, you take poison and you expect the other person to die. And I think that’s true. Revenge and anger hold you in the past; forgiveness can free you to go into the future.
That was an option in my childhood. To be degutted. And it left a tremendous psychic scar on my soul about the world being very scary and horrible. That I needed protection.
