Someone Else's Shoes

by Jojo Moyes

These are not shoes for standing up in.

There are some advantages to being an American woman over forty who no longer has any fucks left on the shelf, and he can see it. It is the first thing she has felt glad about all week.

Nisha is not big on female friends. School had left her with a deep distrust of the subtly volatile dynamics that form when girls get together. Female friendships were febrile, prone to little explosions, frequently leaving you feeling like the ground was shifting under your feet in ways you couldn’t quite fathom.

Some things are just too painful. No, women trade compliments or troubles like currency. Women smile understandingly at your confidences, then use them against you like weapons.

“How many of the decisions you make each day are because you actually want to do something, and how many are to avoid the consequences of not doing it?”

Sometimes Sam feels she has been so conditioned to be useful every minute of every day that there is almost nothing she does in which she is not simultaneously keeping a subconscious tally.

“Maybe you have to think about all the things about your old life that you didn’t enjoy and say, ‘Okay, so here is an opportunity to start again. Perfect freedom. No ties. Maybe this is the dream.’ Maybe one day you will even be happier than you were.” “With no money, no home and none of my things? That’s the biggest bunch of Hallmark greetings-card self-help crap I’ve ever heard.” She inhales angrily. “Perhaps. But if you cannot change your situation, then you have no choice. You can only change how you think about it.”

Strength—real strength—is not doing what someone asks you, necessarily. Strength is turning up every day to a situation that is intolerable, unbearable even, just to support the people you love. Strength is being in that terrible room hour after hour even though every cell in your body is telling you it’s too much for you to cope with.”

There is a shorthand in women this age, Sam realizes. There is none of the sharp elbows of their twenties and thirties, not an ounce of competitiveness. By their late forties and fifties, they’re all survivors, of death, divorce, disease, trauma, of something.

But I seem to be invisible, these days, and when even the man you love doesn’t see you it’s…well, it’s pretty soul-destroying.

“when we’re low, it can be easy to see everything through a prism of negativity. Human beings are remarkably bad at understanding other people’s motivations, even when they know them terribly well. We write all sorts of inaccurate stories in our heads.”

And with all these moments you don’t know that this will be the last or you would be overwhelmed by the poignancy of them, hang on to them like someone unhinged, bury your face in them, never let them go.