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But controlling your brain is not exactly easy. You have to train yourself to romanticize a life outside of men and create a tapestry that’s just as rich without a guy in it. That requires a kind of buoyant solitude that isn’t easy to achieve.
To me, a healthy, happy partnership is one where you pursue some passions as a couple, listen interestedly to those you do separately, and tolerate those you think are ridiculous.
Your taste for reductive dichotomies, along with your outsized reactions to other people’s perceptions of you, may not always serve you, but they probably spring forth from your sensitivity and smarts.
So many people are allergic to confessional, outspoken women. And let’s face it, we’re not always serving the common good. We’re neurotic motherfuckers with way too much on our minds at all times.
We have to be self-protective but still vulnerable.
We’re tempted to provoke, to deliberately rub people the wrong way. We do this because we’re pissed that the world isn’t kind to us. We’re sick of being treated badly just because we have unusual preferences and strong opinions and we talk a little too much. It’s easier to go against the grain if you’re thick-skinned, but we’re not. We’re sensitive. And nothing is quite as hard as being a sensitive, aggressive weirdo.
A lot of people won’t be into you. You will feel the pain of that for your entire life, trust me. You really should accept it and learn to deal with it—not by shutting people out or becoming defensive or rigid, but by (paradoxically!) allowing people space to feel however they happen to feel and making small adjustments to how you move through the world based on what feels good and what doesn’t. It’s okay to be an oversensitive freak. Oversensitive freaks tend to overreact. They tend to spin in circles. But they are some of the most loyal, interesting, intense people around, and they just get
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People who stand up for themselves are magnetic—partly because most people don’t.
So he was a casualty of my youth.
Doing that doesn’t make you a shallow, awful person. It makes you a sane person. It means you care about his well-being. Don’t blame him for being lost and paralyzed by his circumstances. Tell him you believe in him, but you need to move forward separately now. Dump him with compassion. But dump him.
What do you want from your life? Who do you want to be in ten years? What are your strengths and your flaws? You have to know the answers to these questions. When you do, you will be able to say to your date, “I am a regular, flawed person. I’m not here to close the deal at all costs. If there’s something that feels wrong, that’s okay. That tells us we’re not a match.” Easy come, easy go. Letting the wrong ones show their true stripes is just as important as letting the right ones show their true strengths.
Experiments in asking for exactly what you want will go badly. Do it anyway. Do it and expect people to react badly. Because you’re sensitive, you won’t like this. Think about how they feel, and try to empathize.
But do you know where the really strong, smart women are? They’re in the other room, talking contentedly together.
It’s not personal. It’s not even interesting.
Painting someone as weak or pathetic for feeling hurt or overwhelmed or heartbroken is inexcusable. It’s antihuman. This world is filled with people who think feeling less, being indifferent, makes you strong. Don’t believe that. Be one of the smart, thoughtful people who stands up for sensitive people. When you stand up for sensitive, hurt people, you’re also standing up for vulnerability and authenticity and true love.
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” There is no injustice in your life, not anymore.
But recognize, today, that this skidding, stuttering, stalling point is one of the victories, too. This is your time of reckoning.
This way station, this troubling pause, this return to nowhere land, is also a victory.
That was the year I realized I was a bright, burning light, and no fucking insect was going to persuade me to hate myself for it.
The great irony of being a creative, sensitive, talented love seeker is that you’re not always that well suited for such low points.
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.”
I write this from my own desk at five in the morning, my favorite place, a place where I know who I am and what I’m meant to accomplish in this life. Savor that precious space. That space will feel like purgatory at first, because you’ll realize that it all depends on you. That space will feel like salvation eventually, because you’ll realize that it all depends on you.
Start making victorious sounds, and the world will rush in to greet you with more enthusiasm.
But I firmly believe that you have to go for ALL of the things you want, at once.
You have to keep your dreams safe from skeptics. You have to feed them until they grow into something that can’t be doubted anymore.
This life is not perfect. This world is not a perfect place. Sometimes it’s nice to sip a drink, and repeat yourself, among people who aren’t perfect and don’t expect you to be perfect either. Aim low, open your heart, and let them in.
And honestly, I don’t know a better way to battle existential angst and fear than by seizing each day by the throat and forcing it into a shape that feels productive and healthy and on track. You do not sit around bemoaning the big picture, day in and day out. NO. You focus on charging forward, on becoming a better, healthier, more generous, more balanced sort of a person; you call your friends and your family to talk often; you give of yourself; and you resolve to do that again and again, every second of every goddamn day until they come and grab your dead body and shove it into a coffin.
And who can navigate the world with such disingenuous suaveness? (1) Deeply insecure humans who’ve worked very, very hard to shield themselves in a high gloss of fake to obscure their doubts about themselves; (2) actors (See also No. 1); and (3) people with layers and layers of hurt and pain that they haven’t explored, who don’t understand themselves, and who don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves. We are unknowingly privileging insecure pricks, narcissists, actors, liars, and fakes, while regular, humble, gently worn humans get kicked to the curb.
Your problem is that you’ve never forced yourself to define exactly who you are and what you love and how you want to live. You’ve never had to talk about these things passionately. You’ve never dared to lay yourself bare, without apology. Once you can look someone in the eyes and say, “Here’s what really matters to me”? That’s what people find attractive, trust me. They want to be with someone who knows himself and gives a shit. That’s what’s alluring and attractive and irreplaceable, even in this age of smooth make-believe.
sometimes in our lives we have to dare to try on the other side of things, just to see what fits. Sometimes, when there’s a crisis, it means the life we’re leading is starting to chafe.
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?
Stop carrying the shame of this around with you. It’s not yours to carry. It belongs to the weasel who preyed on your ambition and your naïveté.
Tell him the truth. Then put down this load and don’t pick it up again. You’ve carried it around for long enough.
You want the truth; you want to feel what you feel. You want to feel completely, painfully alive, and you know, instinctively, that this includes diving straight into your grief and not coming up to the surface until you feel like you’re ready.
After my dad’s death, I felt more anguished and I felt more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I felt more grateful than ever. I only wanted honest people in my life, people who could talk about heaviness and melancholy and really savor it instead of feeling uncomfortable. I don’t think I stuck to that. I think I couldn’t handle staying in that space for very long, because it made me feel too raw. So I retreated.
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.
Don’t wonder how you will deal with this. You ARE dealing with it.
Don’t wonder how you will get over it. You will NEVER get over it. I know that seems heartbreaking and depressing and wrong. Trust me that it’s also gratifying and miraculous and astonishing and endlessly inspiring and important and helpful.
But sometimes having a big responsibility can actually help you make it through the hard times.
Sometimes, just like Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, you just have to keep getting dressed and straightening up, without questioning it.
But uncertainty is a part of life. Facing uncertainty and failure doesn’t always make people weaker and weaker until they give up. Sometimes it wakes them up, and it’s like they can see the beauty around them for the first time. Sometimes losing everything makes you realize how little you actually need. Sometimes losing everything sends you out into the world to breathe in the air, to pick some flowery weeds, to take in a new day.
Believe in what you love now, with all of your heart, and you will love more and more until everything around you is love. Love yourself now, exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you’ll know exactly how big that is.
