Someone Else's Shoes

by Jojo Moyes

Sam is at that age, the age where all the wrong things seem somehow to stick, fat, the groove between her eyebrows, anxiety, while everything else—job security, marital happiness, dreams—seems to slip effortlessly away.

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.

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.

“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. Do men hear this constant inner voice, telling them constantly to strive to be better, to be productive, to be useful?

“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.”

if you cannot change your situation, then you have no choice. You can only change how you think about it.”

just being female is like being dealt some infinitely crappier hand—a hand nobody else even acknowledges.

And then, of course, laugh off all this unfairness or be deemed a humorless witch.

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.”