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This is what life looks like when you water the seeds of joy with guilt and shame. It feels as good as it sounds.
Life is flexible and has long legs and a million different ways to kick you right in the chops. We lose the ones we love, but we also lose friends, jobs, and our sense of self. And then, we get to assemble something new from whatever is left behind.
After a year, most people stop caring about whatever it is that happened in your life. Not because they’re awful people (though some of them are) but because their lives are also pretty lifey, and you and your tragedy has slid off the bottom of their To Care About list.
In any of these instances, you will leave your body, hovering above yourself while you breathe enough fire to burn any remaining bridges to sanity you may have. When you come back to your body, back to the full consciousness of what you’ve done, and what you’ve been through, you’ll feel it. It’s cold and icy and dark and heavy. It’s the unmistakable knowledge that everything is as broken as you thought it was. Especially you.
The older the person, the more likely I am to trust their opinions,* because they are so often no longer burdened by social norms or even basic manners.
few scant facts about my life. “You should refrain from making any decisions for at least a year,” said people who didn’t realize that not making any decisions is a decision and impossible when you’re the only parent to a small child relying on you to make decisions like where he’ll go to preschool, or where you’ll live together. Children quite rudely insist on growing and changing exponentially each year. Kids will not pause for grief, even if you ask them nicely.
Personal responsibility is such a bummer.
The only thing I know is my own experience, and part of every lived experience is a natural amount of judgment and envy, two feelings that are amplified by the difficulties of motherhood. We all want to know that we are doing a good enough job for the small human beings that have been placed in our care, and we are all sure that someone else has it better or is doing a better job.
the artistic merit of any song is measured by how it echoes through the experiences of your life.
Never explain yourself The people who love you don’t need it The people who don’t will never believe you anyway.
she pictured God as an ocean. Standing on the edge, she could throw in her worries, and watch them be swept out to sea. I liked that.
Even if you’re surrounded by people you love, figuring out grief is a solo project.
because death is loss compounded.
There is really no way around sorrow of this depth, this breadth. He writes after Aaron and my dad have died. It simply has to be gone through. When I come to in the morning, before I’m fully awake, I have this vague, weighty sense of unease, as if there is something radically wrong with the world, and I don’t quite know what it is. Then I remember. We continue to grope about in the darkness. They are in the light.
Grief is a by-product of love. We don’t grieve what we don’t love.
My self-isolation reinforced my belief that I was alone in this, that nobody could possibly understand. Nobody could possibly stand to be with all of this pain.
Even a perfectly curated Instagram feed cannot inoculate us from tragedy.
You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to.
Ernest Hemingway wrote “the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places.”
We humans are experts at hiding our broken parts. We love to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. We absolutely insist that whatever didn’t kill us made us stronger, even if it’s all we can do to get ourselves out of bed in the morning. The broken places are scary, so we do our best to cover them up with big smiles and expensive handbags and well-lit Instagram posts.
The only secret about love that you really need to know is that even when you feel like you’ve worn it out or used it all up, it’s always, always in your power to make more.
I believe in God because I see God every day. I see God in people. I feel God in people. God is not a disinterested Father. God is love.
A world where we receive zero criticism is a world where we are not contributing, where we are living at the very baseline of our abilities. It is a world where I am not doing the work that fuels me. It is a world where I am smaller for the comfort of others, and for my own safety.
The good part is a conjunction? You bet it is. Because and is about possibility and opportunity. And includes what is and makes room for what could be. And doesn’t require you to love the situation, or to like the situation; it just requires you to live.
Because but makes our hearts and possibilities so much smaller than they are. And is where it’s at.
