Nothing worth having comes easy” is not about showing up early at the office. It’s about showing up in your own life. And living inside the very moment you want to run away from.
And then just as suddenly, I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn’t have to actually face them. In many ways I felt I was living the life of a doctor in the ER. I was learning to block out all emotions in order to deal with the situation.
Dennis’s superior mental health was obvious from the first date, like a cleft palate. The other thing about him was that he had shapely, muscular legs. His calves were so sculpted they looked artificial, like silicone implants. This is a look I’m fond of. In fact, if I had been born a girl there is no doubt in my mind that my chest cavity would have been stuffed with two softball-sized orbs of silicone before my eleventh birthday. In this way my own mental health is somewhat like a cleft palate.
I thought, This is how it feels inside the right decision.
I was desperate to discover what nothing felt like. It was the absence of something that attracted me. It was the start. Everything important originated with nothingness.
I think you’re healthy in certain ways, and I think you’re a pathetic disaster in others.
What I am certain of is that there’s something wonky going on beneath the surface of what we call reality. Things are not as they appear. They are much, much more.
If you loathe your job, the situation is improved if you can do it in your underwear. Drunk.
Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition. Even when we lose a leg or an arm, there’s not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.
Pain is interesting. I dislike it immensely but I’ve never experienced pain and boredom at the same time. Even when I had unending and severe pain in my lower back for several years I was never bored by the pain, though it exhausted me.
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.
This is what I’m saying: you hate your life. But you don’t know what life is. Life is too huge for you to possibly hate. If you hate life, you haven’t seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it’s because your life is too small and doesn’t fit you.
Instead of becoming depressed that I was in the locked ward of a mental hospital, I pretended I was playing a role in a movie, possibly on my way to an Emmy.
I placed my hand against the side of his precious, electric face and felt the stubble beneath my fingers. I was overwhelmed with the lust and wonder of it all.
She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella.
The truth behind the truth is this: even if you are a victim, you must never be a victim. Even if you deserve to be one. Because while you wait for somebody to come along and set things right, life has moved forward without you.
It was so extraordinarily out of the ordinary.
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.
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.