Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

“And don’t talk too much, either. Remember: What women think of as sharing, men see as complaining.”

That’s how life is. Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.

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.”

That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: how we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.

Now, for the first time, I saw it unfold from a new angle. Hers. And it changed the story.

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 not the easy moments that define who we are. It’s the hard ones.

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. I do it because I know for certain that our world has an empathy problem with women, and this is one brave thing I can do to help fix it.