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the ceremonies that allow us to shoulder complicated feelings and confront loss; that make room for the seemingly paradoxical act of acknowledging the past as a path toward the future. It gets me thinking about the other ways we mark the crossing of thresholds: birthdays and weddings and baby showers, baptisms and bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras. These rites of passage allow us to migrate from one phase of our lives to another; they keep us from getting lost in transit. They show us a way to honor the space between no longer and not yet. But I have no predetermined rituals. They are mine to
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when life brings you to the floor, there is a choice: You can allow the worst thing that’s ever happened to you to hijack your remaining days, or you can claw your way back into motion.
recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.
I rewind old scenes from my life, seeing countless mistakes and regrettable choices, unable to do anything about them now except better understand what happened.
“Forgiveness is a refusal to armor your own heart—a refusal to live in a constricted heart,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to me. “Living with that openness means feeling pain. It’s not pretty, but the alternative is feeling nothing at all.”
When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. “The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,” he says. “The key is to be present wherever you are right now.”
Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.
It’s a tricky balance, attempting to find resonance in someone’s story without reducing your suffering to sameness.
