Tell Me More: Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

by Kelly Corrigan

“Accepting things as they are is difficult. A lot of people go to war with reality.”

“Being in our lives as they are is probably one of the most common struggles people have,” Will said. “Going back thousands of years.”

Shouldn’t loss change a person, for the better, forever? Maybe Will’s curious phrase—It’s like this—applies here, too. This forgetting, this slide into smallness, this irritability and shame, this disorienting grief: It’s like this. Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.

As Voltaire said: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

“That’s why I love being with these kids, being a part of this.” She looked out across the cafeteria. “Everyone here knows what it’s like. You know, when your mom dies, or your dad, it becomes your life. It’s all-consuming because everyone is reacting to it. It’s driving everyone’s behavior—your coaches, your teachers, your mailman. It’s super isolating. But not here.”

still miss him. But that’s normal,” she told me as she reorganized her hair into a fresh ponytail. “There’s no one right way to feel bad, to want something you can’t have. And there’s no one right way to feel better.”

Knowing people takes time, which we all swear we don’t have, or some mitigating circumstance like being caught in an elevator, or war. Huddled in the foxhole, Liz and I said it all. We were judgmental and bitchy together—desperate and existential too. Occasionally, we were our highest and bravest selves, working our way through the darkest ideas. I was lucky to know Liz that well, to know anyone that well. You can’t be really loved if you can’t bear to be really known.

we can be damaged and heavy-hearted but still buoyant and insightful, still essential and useful, just by saying I know.

Sexually, professionally, personally, saying no takes balls. One friend told me her one big takeaway from three years and $11,000 of therapy was Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.

Little noes prepare us for the big noes that define the major movements of our lives. The job we shouldn’t take, the relationship we must leave, the deal that seems shady. No, finally, to another drink, no to abuse, no to getting back together again. No to extreme life-saving measures.

There’s hardly a positive intention associated with no. Except self-preservation.

Rather than trying to make me happy, as cheap pop songs and misguided greeting cards suggest is the promise of true love, Edward was doing the one thing that would keep us together: taking care of himself. As with my parents, sometimes the art of relationship is declaring your limits, protecting your boundaries, saying no.

But, even as I own up to my wrongs, I wonder if it’s ill-advised to call attention to the lesser parts of myself. What if the truth about my character is not that great and this is how word gets out? Not to mention: once I say out loud that I was wrong to toss or undermine or shirk, I can’t keep tossing, undermining, or shirking. Being a permanently better partner than I have been seems unlikely and a hair ambitious. It’s a daunting combination: exposing our crappiest selves and creating expectations of personal change.

That’s how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too—not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected. The mentors and rabbis, the grannies on the bema, are certain about things we can’t yet believe: that listening is huge, that there’s might in the act of committing yourself to a cause, that trying again is both all we can do and our great enabling power. They see clearly that we weren’t wrong; our aim was. They know that we are good enough, as we are, with not much more than our hopeful, honorable intent to keep at it. They tell us, over and over, until we can hear it.

The first time the words pass between two people: electrifying. Ten thousand times later: cause for marvel. The last time: the dream you revisit over and over and over again.

The other problem with language is that arranging words into sentences requires we flip on our thinking machine, which necessarily claims some of our focus, so that as soon as we start deciding how to explain a feeling, we’re not entirely feeling the feeling anymore, and some feelings want to be felt at full capacity.