Broken (in the best possible way)

by Jenny Lawson

It’s weird because we often try to present our fake, shiny, happy selves to others and make sure we’re not wearing too-obvious pajamas at the grocery store, but really, who wants to see that level of fraud? No one. What we really want is to know we’re not alone in our terribleness.

It’s a strange thing … to be tangled up in things no one else really cares about. To be so busy with worry that your constant back-and-forth looks like utter inaction. To be so afraid of doing something wrong that you end up doing something worse. To be exhausted by a marathon that looks like complete paralysis on the outside but feels like being on both sides of a violent tug-of-war on the inside. It’s not just emails and chapters and voicemails. It’s more. It’s the whole world. It’s every terrible thing that happens in the universe that I feel like I need to speak out about but then don’t because fear stops me. Then I fear that inaction. I fear that my silence is equal to agreement with terrible things. I fear when I do speak out that I’ve done so inelegantly, or wrongly, or that I’ve made things worse. That it’s not my place to speak or that it’s not my place to be silent.