Any Man

by Amber Tamblyn

Your hell is yours and you get to decide, okay? You get to decide when you’re ready. It’s important that I say this, though: It’s not your fault, whatever happened to you. It’s not your fault. But healing your own pain does belong to you now. When we become aware, we become responsible.

“Anger has that peculiar quality of isolation; like sorrow, it cuts one off, and for the time being, at least, all relationship comes to an end. Anger has the temporary strength and vitality of the isolated. There is a strange despair in anger; for isolation is despair.”

How can you forgive yourself?

How can you end your own suffering, without ending completely?

People will completely freak out over your hard-earned success when you least expect it. Jealousy is mercurial. It doesn’t always show up the way you think it will.

culture that feels kind of predatory ya know? I mean, that lady did the crimes, but we publicized it. We capitalized on it. We exploited it for ratings or whatever, for stories, with our memes and GIFs and tweeting and all that. We jump on the train. We show their pictures on live TV. We make clever hashtags. We find ways to, like, absolve ourselves from responsibility or say we’ve helped out with a retweet or something. We’ve helped because we’ve mentioned an injustice in passing to our neighbor and

we both got to shake our heads. We’ve helped because we painted a sign.

I perished before pushing through. I had to end before I could begin again.

They. Don’t. Care. About. Us. People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road,

We are a country that capitalizes on the fetishizing of felonies. A country that says “innocent until proven guilty,” even though the proving of assault is nearly impossible.

homeless man asks me for change, his dog tied to a pole by a handkerchief. Poor dog. I have money on me, but I’d rather keep it. I don’t mind his suffering. I prefer it.