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June 27 - June 29, 2021
The world has told you lies about how small you are. You will look back on this time and say, “I had it all, but I didn’t even know it. I was at the center, I could breathe in happiness, I could swim to the moon. I had everything I needed.”
Being an idealist is worthless unless you have a strategy for sustaining yourself and aiming for a more conscientious way of living. If devil negotiation is replaced with idleness, you may not be doing business with the devil, but you may not be doing much of anything, really.
There are people who treat cancer patients like they must’ve turned down breast milk for blue Slurpees as babies, or they must’ve spent their teenage years sunbathing while huffing spray paint. There are people who treat divorced women like they must’ve gained too much weight or henpecked their poor innocent husbands to death. These are the dots we connect in order to assure ourselves that nothing bad will ever happen to us.
I could see that I would have to become a new kind of person in order to survive. I felt terrible, of course, but you can feel terrible and also feel fully alive. You can feel crushed and also feel inspired and hopeful. In your darkest moments, look for some hope. It’s there.
Struggling with a shitty job is part of growing up. You punch the clock at a horrible job for a few years, and guess what? It sucks. But eventually, you start to figure out how to get a job you actually enjoy.
Letting the wrong ones show their true stripes is just as important as letting the right ones show their true strengths.
As a parent, you do have to constantly remind yourself that you are not a god, molding a human in your own image. You are merely supporting whatever your child chooses to become, even if those choices don’t always thrill you. It’s easy enough to embrace and support a toddler who loves dolphins or playing house. It’s harder to accept and appreciate a fully grown human who has her own body and her own ideas.
Guys assume that other guys are indifferent unless they have explicit proof otherwise. So should you.
As long as you aim to please men, you don’t. The second you decide to please yourself, guess what? Everybody wants a slice of that action.
If a guy seems to love you yet his behaviors show an interest in creating greater and greater distance, if he never takes responsibility for anything he says or does, backs away when you need him most, or seems unable or unwilling to get to the bottom of any conflict with you? You shouldn’t marry that guy.
Artists are not easy people to like. Their feelings often come before yours. That’s how they have to live sometimes, just to remember, just to locate the center of the thing.
Stop being grateful for scraps. Everything good in my life has surged forth from one crucial moment or another when I said, “I am not settling for these scraps anymore. I want more than this for myself.”
It’s also crucial to remember that even when people “already have their friends” and everything has fallen into place, it can easily fall out of place at any time. Not to mention the many people who look at their existing friendships in their twenties and say, “What the fuck? WHO ARE THESE TERRIBLE PEOPLE?”
Some of your closest, lifelong friends may not seem like close, lifelong friends for the first five or six years you know them. Seriously. It takes time to figure out who matters, who listens, who tells the truth, who comes through in a pinch, who’s down to earth, who appreciates you and accepts your flaws, who says the right thing at the right time, and who makes sense all around.
The biggest mistake new mothers make is telling themselves, “I should be able to handle this all by myself.” Bullshit. You should do what you need to do to take care of yourself and not send yourself off a fucking cliff emotionally. Babies have no use for parents whose nerves are frayed to the point of no return, and babies are biologically designed to fray nerves like a motherfucker because it guarantees that their needs will get met.
Why do we live in a world where manipulative bullies are treated like crafty heroes and naive youngsters with big dreams are made to feel pathetic?
Incredible sadness carries with it an ability to touch the purest strain of joy, to experience an almost ecstatic release, to see an almost blinding, undiluted beauty in everything.
