We have to be whole people to find whole love, even if we have to make it up for a while.
It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do. And you’re going to bawl your head off doing it. But I promise you it will be okay. Your tears will be born of grief, but also of relief. You will be better for them. They will make you harder, softer, cleaner, dirtier. Free. A glorious something else awaits.
Of this I am absolutely sure: Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you’d done in your youth. I know too many people who didn’t do those things. They all end up mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions of the people they intended to be.
Also, because it’s harder to be magnanimous when you’re in your twenties, I think, and so that’s why I’d like to remind you of it.
He said, “Don’t get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don’t need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don’t have to be broken for me.
I’d reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn’t have. I.
Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn, burying the evidence before hiking on.
You don’t have to be broken for me. I didn’t have to be broken for him, even though parts of me were. I could be every piece of myself and he’d love me still. My appeal did not rely on my weakness or my need. It relied on everything I was and wanted to be.
Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself. Every last one of us can do better than give up.
Bring the man you aspire to be, the one who already has the love he longs for. Play every piece of yourself and play it with all you’ve got until you’re not playing anymore. That’s what Cary Grant did. The lonely boy who lost his mom in the fog of his father’s deceit found himself in the magic of wanting to be. His name was Archibald Leach.
Do you know what boundaries are? The best, sanest people on the planet do.
I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it.
You’re generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear.
I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth.
They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals. They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors.
Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.
Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here to Serve button has been eternally pinned. We’re expected to nurture and give by the very virtue of our femaleness, to consider other people’s feelings and needs before our own.
Humans are beautifully imperfect and complex. We’re horny, ass-saving, ego-driven drug fiends, among other, more noble things.
I was not going to nod. Everything that had ever happened to me in my whole life was mixed into the cement that kept my head perfectly still.