Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

“So, to succeed in my new job, I basically need to be an asexual, androgynous, human robot that’s dead to all physical and emotional sensation.”

So... like working at Starbucks?

Of course, our parents get an extra dose of importance in our minds. When we’re little, they’re everything—the gods and goddesses that rule our worlds. It takes a lot of growing up, and a lot of disappointment, to accept that they’re just normal, bumbling, mistaken humans, like everybody else.

“Choosing to love—despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love anyway … That’s not weakness. That’s courage.”

All the hardships and insults and disappointments in life didn’t make this one blissful moment less important. They made it more. They made it matter. The very fact that it couldn’t last was the reason to hold on to it—however we could.

Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn’t to never feel hope, or bliss, or love—but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came. The answer wasn’t to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could.

It’s a big deal to share your grief with other people—to give them a glimpse of the pain you carry. It connects you in a profound way.

I do it because I believe that human connection is the only thing that will save us. I do it because I believe we learn empathy when we listen to other people’s stories and feel their pain with them.

This is why I read constantly. I want to understand.

I know why women don’t speak out. It’s hard enough just to survive.