The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.
I had arrived. I’d done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I’d always tell myself though I didn’t know the meaning of it just yet.
Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I longed for nothing but food and waterr and to be able to pt my backpack down.
When I say you don’t have to explain what you’re going to do with your life, I’m not suggesting you lounge around whining about how difficult it is. I’m suggesting you apply yourself in directions for which we have no accurate measurement. I’m talking about work. And love.
How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life.
Eddie sat on my other side, but I could not look at him. If I looked at him we would both crumble like dry crackers. I thought about my older sister, Karen, and my younger brother, Leif. About my husband, Paul, and about my mother’s parents and sister, who lived a thousand miles away. What they would say when they knew. How they would cry. My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.
When I have something to say that’s particularly hard to say, I often write it down first.
I have carried the weight of my student loan debt for about half of my life now, but I have not been “defined by my ‘student loan’ identity.” I do not even know what a student loan identity is. Do you? What is a student loan identity?
That both things could be true at once – my disbelief as well as my certainty – was the unification of the ancient and the future parts of me. It was everything I intended and yet still I was surprised by what I got.
It is, I guess, exactly what you’re stuck with if you can’t get some perspective on this matter, sweet pea.
I’m also reminded of how those words no longer belong only to me; how, when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.
We need books, and Cheryl’s books in particular, because we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love. Radical.
It’s the threadbare cape you’ve wrapped around yourself composed of self-pitying half truth. And it absolutely will not serve you.
If I believed in God, I’d see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it. That would have been true regardless of the outcome of Emma’s surgery. It would have been the grace that carried you through even if things had not gone as well as they did, much as we hate to ponder that.
You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don’t say this as a condemnation – I need regular reminders to stop feeling sorry for myself too.
I’m going to address you bluntly, but it’s a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgment of you.
I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she’d been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought.
It’s reality. And reality is what we have to accept, like it or not.
It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted – and yet it was impossible to do.
It will never be okay,” a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. “It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.