Status Updates From Notes to Self

I knew that I would break something. And now I had – I’d broken the car. And I was elated. Because I had thought the thing that would get broken was me.

“After all, nice girls don’t get the corner office.”

So, I did get a corner office but then a male exec asked to swap. I said yes not because I wanted to be nice, but really I didn’t need a bigger room. But this is an interesting tip of an iceberg sitch. Huh!

And so I side-stepped. Which is, of course, a kind of silence.

I denied what had happened to me because it was the only way I knew how to survive.

When I got home, the hall light was on. Mum always left it on for me. I see that light now as a sign that she was waiting, worrying, all of those nights.

”But still I couldn’t help it – I read those ads and articles about labiaplasty and I wondered if I had to start hating myself all over again. Was I too big, too loose, too unsightly?”

OMG I’m literally laughing. Simply, how social media and to large extent, patriarchal gaze has shaped the performance of personhood these days.

What my mother spent on raising two children, my father spent on drinking.

the person who loves the addict exhausts and renews their love on a daily basis…

As we tuck the new sheets around him, it becomes clear how much our sense of humanity depends on these basic things….

It is difficult to translate a great love, a great life, into words on a page. It sounds so prosaic - raking leaves, smiling at each other in understanding - but it is in the everyday moments that the tenacity of love, and its depth, are often revealed.