As my friend Amy observed: “Divorce is like a Polaroid picture. What truly happened will develop over time and you will see.
I can almost never say what I’m thinking at any given moment. I would have been stabbed to death years ago.
Only by embracing all that you regret and not denying it, only by placing the highest value on what you’ve gained because of all you’ve lost, does regret lose the ability to cripple you.
A lack of “self-esteem” really suggests a feeling of shame over being one’s self. Shame is the landfill emotion. It’s not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else. A manipulation. Shame is very heavy, dense disappointment; somebody else’s, in you. Inside of disappointment is a deeper judgment: Less than. Inferior. Defective.
In fact, you can be a very honest person and yet not be living a truthful life. And not even realize it. This matters because stripping away all the inaccuracies, misunderstandings, and untruths that surround you is exactly how you can overcome anything at all. Truth is accuracy. Without accuracy, you can’t expect to manifest large, specific changes in your life.
Except this “if we’re meant to meet, we’ll meet” attitude isn’t truly relaxed. So we’re not going to commend you for it. This attitude is more passive than relaxed. A passivity born of entitlement. You are owed a soul mate; this has been promised to you since birth. Everybody knows that. So why worry?
Two hundred tons of ore is a great amount of ore. If, after a reasonable amount of time and effort you remain unhappily single, my suggestion is that you employ the services of a cat or a dog. Both cats and dogs are known hiding places of soul mates. They are also very, very good at getting strangers to talk to them in kind voices. Which, it should be noted, could be of some use to those who might otherwise be too shy to step forward and say, hello.
That may be true,” I thought, “But they don’t have digital cable or Internet access, so really what’s the point of being alive?” Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: “I Love the 80s on VH1.
In a way, I am a psychological transsexual, always trying to “pass” for a normal person but being clocked every time.
I realized I’d only seen him at night in dim, flattering restaurant lighting. The sun was not his friend.
It’s okay to like me, because I’m just like you.” Everybody feels a bit like a dented can inside. Even the slickest, most polished person you can think of is more aware of their shortcomings and flaws than their talents and gifts.
I had never before considered the possibility that I might never even want a drink yet still be left with this horrible, throbbing vacancy in the center of my being, right where my mental health and contentment were supposed to be.
You see, even though back when I was drinking I thought nothing bad ever happened to me, something did. Time passed. A lot of time passed. In bars, at parties with people I didn’t care for. It was always the drink. It wasn’t about love or reading the Sunday paper in bed. Or housebreaking a puppy. Or anything that people call ‘life.’ It was about drinking. So actually, something bad, very bad, did happen to me. I wasted my life. And now, what little I have left, I want.
One minute we were sitting at the lowly kitchen table moaning about the sorry state of our lives and the next we were liberating the architecture with heavy projectiles. This was pure, freedom. Better than sniffing glue.
The Anti-christ of mental health and emotional maturity.
I understood that I was clearly insane. But he apparently hadn’t picked up on how many times in one short letter I asserted that I was not. This acceptance of my questionable mental health made me feel confident that we would be compatible, possibly for life. I.
This is the truest thing I know. Scars are nothing to hate, they are nothing to deny. They serve as our proof of what we survived, and there is nothing more beautiful than to have survived something.
It is an awful, just sickening feeling, I discovered, to live with somebody, to exist in the midst of sharing a life, only to realize it is utterly doomed. It was botulism of the soul. I’d had such ambition for building a life together, because I wanted that strength of character and security. But I had overlooked the most important thing: he wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t right for him. Merely wanting us to be right and good together wasn’t enough.
I was desperate to show him what I could do on my own. But my father, because he hadn’t been there, simply didn’t believe what I was actually capable of accomplishing.
Sometimes, people avoid recognizing how they feel because they believe the feelings are a part of them, and admitting to harboring anger or jealousy feels like admitting to a physical flaw. So certain feelings are denied. Which is something like believing your house is clean as long as you don’t peek under the beds.