What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.”

By focusing on a receding, elusive goal, we have the luxury of remaining haunted forever.

As I moved my things into that dusty, tiny, haunted house, I looked around and thought, “This will never be enough.” It was exactly what I wanted.

I wanted to be honest, but I also wanted to be loved. These things were already starting to seem like they might be at odds with each other.

The best version of you is who you are right here, right now, in this fucked-up, impatient, imperfect, sublime moment.

“You once wrote me a letter…telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful, lie you ever told me.”

“Little Natalie, never rest until you have uncovered your essential self. Remember that. Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.”

upstairs. “First they tell you lies,” she says to Natalie, “and they make you believe them. Then they give you a little of what they promised, just a little, enough to keep you thinking you’ve got your hands on it. Then you find out that you’re tricked, just like everyone else,

“Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience,” Adrienne Rich wrote.

It’s hard to want what we have; it’s far easier to want everything in the world.

Instead of treating her sensitive observation of her fellow students’ scarcity mentality as the miracle that it is, the therapist pathologizes her gift of sight.

It’s important to recognize that even in the most compromised-seeming relationships and situations, even in the most imperfect life circumstances, you can find sustenance and grace.

Even when you feel polluted by a repetitive, aggressive world and alienated from the people within it,

to see them in terms of action instead of finished achievement.