Without Merit

by Colleen Hoover

He takes a step closer to me and it suddenly feels like I’ve swallowed his heart because I have all these extra beats in my chest.

I nod. “Is that weird?” He laughs quietly. “Everything you do is weird,” he says. But before I can reflect too much on that comment, he says, “It’s my favorite thing about you.”

“Having depression is no more out of your control than Sagan’s intolerance to milk, or Utah’s pale skin, or Honor’s bad vision. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. But it’s not something you can ignore or correct on your own. And it doesn’t make you abnormal. It makes you just as normal as these idiots,”

What I’m saying is, the same two things could happen to two people, but that doesn’t mean they would experience the exact same stress over it. We all have different levels of stress that we’re accustomed to. You probably felt the same amount of stress over your family situation as I sometimes do about mine, even though they’re on completely different levels. But that doesn’t make you weaker. It doesn’t make you an asshole. We’re just two different people with two different sets of experiences.”