Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

“Fun” was, in fact, a word that had stormed into my life since having children. I used it constantly these days. Somewhere early on I’d discovered that if you tell a child something is fun, for the most part, that child will believe you. As far as I could tell, this principle could not be over-exploited, and none of the boys in my family ever seemed to catch on.

I closed my eyes and tried to feel waves of relief washing up against me. But I couldn’t. Because, as often happened, before I’d gotten rid of one worry, a bigger one had already taken its place.

For a person like me—a worrier who liked to take a full forty-eight-hour period to stew over just about any decision—having to formulate and execute a response in one second was a tall order.

Life only goes forward. All you can really do is try to honor the past and be the best version of yourself in the present.

We tend to think of “comedy” and “tragedy” as opposites of each other, like they live at distant ends of the spectrum of human experience. But, really, they live shoulder to shoulder.