The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to produce.
She loved horses and Hank Williams and had a best friend named Babs.
There are stories hidden in the language we use, whether we’re conscious of them or not. They tell the truth of our hearts and minds.
Ultimatums have negative connotations for many because they’re often used by bullies and abusers, who tend to be comfortable pushing their partners’ backs against a wall, demanding that he or she choose this or that, all or nothing. But when used by emotionally healthy people with good intentions, ultimatums offer a respectful and loving way through an impasse that will sooner or later destroy a relationship on its own anyway.
Your ultimatum is simple. It’s fair. And it’s stating your own intentions, not what you hope theirs will be.
We didn’t exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.
You don’t need a reason to leave.
He hadn’t loved.
As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this – the hardest thing I’d ever done. I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
I prayed to the whole wide universe and hoped that God would be in it, listening to me.
It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we’re brave enough to touch the rawest, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without pause and see – thrillingly, terrifyingly – that it was never her we had to fear. It was always only us.
I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail this darkly.
I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing.
That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me.
A room with a view!” my mother exclaimed, though she was too weak to rise and see the lake herself. And then more quietly she said: “All of my life I’ve waited for a room with a view.
My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.
So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at its very center.
I didn’t know where I was going until I got there. It.
That your friends have those opinions, however, does not mean that they don’t love you or value you as a friend or otherwise think you are one of the best people they know.