What You Wish For

by Katherine Center

Especially my friend Alice. Six feet tall, friendly, and relentlessly positive Alice, who was a math specialist and wore a T-shirt with a math joke on it every day to work.

I love her already

“Joy is an antidote to fear. To anger. To boredom. To sorrow.” “But you can’t just decide to feel joyful.” “True. But you can decide to do something joyful.”

“It’s not about fixing all your problems, anyway,” Max said. “You’ll never fix all your problems.” “Well, that’s encouraging.” “The point is to be happy anyway. As often as you can.”

“We’re not going to freak out. We’re going to choose to believe everything’s okay until we have evidence to the contrary.”

“So we’re blackmailing him.” She shrugged. “In a good way.”

The socks he was wearing today? They had polka dots.

Out of context, it's probably weird that this is making me cry.

“Dude—I’m not happy because it comes easily to me. I bite and scratch and claw my way toward happiness every day.” Duncan squinted at me, like that almost made sense. “It’s a choice,” I went on, feeling like I needed to make him see. “A choice to value the good things that matter. A choice to rise above everything that could pull you down. A choice to look misery right in the eyes … and then give it the finger.” “So it’s a hostile kind of joy.” He was mocking me. “Sometimes,” I said defiantly. “Is that a real thing though?” “It’s a deliberate kind of joy. It’s a conscious kind of joy. It’s joy on purpose.” Duncan squinted like he really wasn’t sold. “In clown socks and a tutu.” “I’m telling you. I know all about darkness. That’s why I am so hell-bent, every damn day, on looking for the light.”

But I suspected that Babette knew better than to let a little pain hold her back. She knew that joy and sorrow walked side by side. She knew that being alive meant risking one for the other. And she also knew, as I was starting to understand in a whole new way, that it was always better to dance than to refuse.

The world keeps hanging on to this idea that love is for the gullible. But nothing could be more wrong. Love is only for the brave.

Love makes you better because it’s hard. Taking risks makes you better because it’s terrifying. That’s how it works. You’ll never get anything that matters without earning it. And even what you get”—she lifted her chin in defiance—“you won’t get to keep. Joy is fleeting. Nothing lasts. That’s exactly what courage is. Knowing all that going in—and going in anyway.”

We didn’t fix everything for each other—but we didn’t have to. We just made a choice to be there.

Reading for joy is about giving yourself permission to read what you want to read—instead of what you think you should want to read. It’s about getting to know yourself as a reader—learning to follow your own compass about the stories that are going to resonate for you. I have a theory that finding the right story at the right time is one of the most nourishing things you can do for yourself. Stories have this magical way of going straight to the heart—and if the right story finds you at the right time, it can change your life. It can teach you things you didn’t even consciously know you needed to learn. We all come out of school with a certain amount of baggage about reading and stories. We’ve absorbed other people’s opinions about what stories are “good” or worth our time. Reading for joy is about learning to decide for yourself what a good story is for you at any given moment in your life—and letting joy be your guide. Because if a story captivates, delights, or just works for you, that’s a good story. Period.

YES!!!