The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.

And it had certainly never crossed my mind that my reaction—my suffering—was mine: something I had come up with, not something I needed to blame on anyone else.

Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.