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The soul seemed to flower as the body declined.
She could see his face, but not behind it.
She was guilty, after all, of success, a success that stemmed from birthright and privilege. She took hope for granted, saw opportunity as her due, and had never really had to worry about vanishing into a sea of unseen faces and unseen voices.
For all the talk of progress, of equal footing, of a post-sexist generation, a woman still couldn’t sit alone at a bar and have a drink without drawing stares.
We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we’re the last to know.
“What I don’t like about myself is that sometimes I don’t really like myself.”
We live in a world of disposable memory. Nothing’s built to last, not even shame.”
What she saw when she pictured the outside world was what she felt when she dared enter it—that it came at her like a storm cloud. Encircled her. Took bites of her. Inserted itself into her body like a straw and sucked her dry. In return, it gave her nothing. It thwarted all her attempts to engage it in kind, to be rewarded for her attempts to be a part of it. It sucked her up into its swirl, spun her, and then spit her out of its maelstrom before moving on to its next victim.
Wonderfully accurate description of how anxiety feels and affects people.
“That if you believe, really believe, and if your strategy is sound, and if you’re willing to leave everything you’ve got on the field of battle to win the day”—he held his arms wide—“you can do anything.”
“A complaint that’s not looking for a solution is a disease that’s not looking for a cure.”
Safety is an illusion we sell to children to help them sleep.
It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit.
And if by some twist of fate there wasn’t, if all that remained of the world was night and no way to climb out of it? Then she’d make a friend of the night.
