His and Hers

by Alice Feeney

There is a difference between being and feeling alone, and it is possible to miss someone and be with them at the same time.

There are over seven billion people on the planet, and yet I have somehow managed to spend a lifetime feeling alone.

We rarely deserve the lives we lead. We pay for them however we can, be it with money, guilt, or regret.

It’s the kind of place people come to die, and somewhere I never thought I’d find myself living.

Silence is my favourite symphony; I can’t think clearly when life gets too loud.

There are some things we only hold on to because of who gave them to us: names, beliefs, scarves.

We all have secrets; some we won’t even tell ourselves.

Sometimes I think I am the unreliable narrator of my own life. Sometimes I think we all are.

Silence is a fear I’ve learned to feel, rather than hear. It creeps up on me, often lurking in the loudest corners of my mind.

Anxiety often screams louder than logic, and when you spend too long imagining the worst you can make it come true.

Sometimes our memories reframe themselves to reveal prettier pictures of our past, something a little less awful to look back at. Sometimes we need to paint over them, to pretend not to remember what is hidden underneath.

We all have cracks, the little dents and blemishes that life makes in our hearts and minds, cemented by fear and anxiety, sometimes plastered over with fragile hope.

The only people with no regrets are liars.

Sometimes we all do good things because we feel bad.

Sometimes I find the only way to ease the worst forms of pain is to damage myself in a different way. Distract my attention from the things that can and will break me. A little hurt to help me heal.

Something changed when my husband and I lost our daughter. A small part of us died when she did. But like ghosts who don’t know they are dead, we carried on haunting ourselves and each other for a long time afterwards.

We are a species capable of horrific acts, and incapable of learning from the lessons our own history tries to teach us.

It’s like Halloween every day in this business – grown adults wearing scary masks, pretending to be something they’re not.

I think when we finally get what we think we want, it loses its value. It’s the secret nobody ever shares, because if they did, we would all stop trying.

The truth is that life broke us, and when we finally acknowledged that we didn’t know how to fix each other, we stopped trying.

Popularity can spoil a place just like it can spoil a person.

Home is not always where the heart is. For people like me, home is where the hurt lives that made us into who we are.

Memories are shapeshifters. Some bend, some twist, and some shrivel and die over time. But our worst ones never leave us.

There are things children choose not to see in their parents; sometimes it is best to walk past a mirror without stopping to look at your reflection.

In my experience, there are two kinds of women: those who spend a lifetime trying not to turn into their mothers, and those who literally seem to want nothing more. I often find both varieties get the complete opposite of what they hoped for – one set become carbon copies of the women they didn’t want to be, while the others never live up to their own expectations of who they think they should have become.

You can’t help someone find their way if they won’t admit they’re lost.

I think you reach an age – and it is different for everyone – where you finally realise that all the things you thought mattered, don’t. It often happens when you lose the one thing that really did, but by then it’s too late.

Sometimes we hold on too tight to the wrong people, until it hurts so much we have to let go.

People will go to extraordinary lengths to hurt those they love; far more than they ever do for those they hate.

We pretend not to see the scars we give one another, especially those we love.

Sometimes I think people change their expressions just to give their faces something to do. A smile doesn’t mean someone is happy, just like tears don’t always mean someone is sad. Our faces lie just as often as our words do.

People rarely see themselves the way others do; we all carry broken mirrors.

People can change, they just tend to choose not to.

Losing someone you truly love always feels like losing a part of yourself.

We all try to buy a little more time, but it’s priceless. We get what we’re given, not what we can afford. Time is a trapdoor we all tumble down at some point in our lives, often completely unaware of how far we have fallen.

The emotional walls we build are there to keep the real us inside, as well as to keep others out.

We all hide behind the version of ourselves we let the rest of the world see.

Life sometimes seems like a hamster wheel we can only step off if we know to stop running.

It is far easier to borrow love than it is to pay it back.

Families often paint their own portraits in a different light, using colours the rest of us can’t quite see.

Lives are like lightbulbs; they’re not as hard to change as people think.

Human beings are capable of inflicting unspeakable misery – on themselves as well as others

I think maybe that’s because we’re all the same. There is an energy that connects us together, flowing through us like electricity. We are all just light bulbs. Some shine brighter than others, some show us the way when we are lost. Others are a little too dull to be of any real use or interest. Some burn out. We are the same but different, trying to shine in the darkness, but the light that connects us can sometimes grow too faint to see.

There is a curtain we all hide behind; the only difference is who pulls it aside. Some people can do it themselves, while others need someone else to reveal the truth about who they really are.

People tend to see what they want in the people they love. They reshape them inside their heads, twisting them into the people they wish they were, instead of the people they are.

Everyone has a place they run to when the world gets too loud;

Success is like love – it’s not something everyone can appreciate, even when they have it. And life is about moving forwards and moving on. Never look back; that way only leads to feeling lost.

Maybe life already has a plan for us all, and we only get lost when we shy away from it, through fear, or pain, or heartbreak.

The lies we tell ourselves are always the most dangerous. I think it’s instinct; self-preservation is a fundamental part of our DNA.

Honesty loses every time to a lie less ordinary, and truth is overrated. Far better to make it up than to make do.