Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I’d come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn’t feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn’t me against it. We two were one.
Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice.
And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard.
Telling has a way of dispersing things. It will allow your lover to stand closer inside the circle of you. Let him.
With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.
No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.
My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale. It’s so simple it breaks my heart. How unspecial that fact is to so many, how ordinary for a child to wear a dress her grandmother bought her, but how very extraordinary it was to me.
I imagined our mother crossing a great river on Lady’s strong back, finally leaving us nearly three years after she died. I wanted it to be true. It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make.
I suppose this is what I mean when I say we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives.
I was bypassing the High Sierra – missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses.
There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
Desperation is unsustainable.
In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large:.
We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.
True intimacy isn’t a psychodrama.
You’re granting the crazy lady way too much power. Your sorrow and fear has clouded your ability to be reasonable about your mortality. And if you continue in this vein, it’s going to rob you of the life you deserve.
The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: Your mother would be proud of you.
Are you really not going to pursue your dream because you now have one more bill than you had before? Are you truly so cowed by adversity?
But I had walked here, and I wasn’t ready to give up on seeing the High Sierra just yet.
I strongly encourage you to let go of these beliefs. They are inaccurate and melodramatic and they do not serve you.