Before We Were Innocent

by Ella Berman

“He said that some people believe we choose our parents before we’re born, because they have something to teach us. And that doesn’t always look how you think it will, and it won’t always be a lesson taught intentionally by them, or even in good faith, but whatever we do learn is necessary for our souls to progress.”

“You should know better than most that not everything can be solved. Sometimes your entire fucking life catches on fire for no reason other than to remind you of how fragile it all is. How little control we have over any of it,”

show me an eighteen-year-old saint, and I’ll show you a liar.

slipping away bit by bit, yielding and folding until one day you look in the mirror and don’t recognize what you’ve become. I wonder if Joni ever gets to be her true self these days, or if this constant striving and learning and teaching, this relentless ambition and inability to sit still or be alone,

Maybe Joni was right and life is about being fucking terrified and still showing up and turning yourself inside out because you know that loving someone gives them the power to break you, but that maybe, one day, you might just be lucky enough to stumble across another human who recognizes you exactly as you are and who will spend the rest of their life learning how to strike a match to fill your darkness.

friendship is about pure love (not unconditional but something more valuable), and friends are the people we can trust to coax our true selves back out, even when we’ve been hidden away for years.