Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.
Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he’d become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
The only way out of a hole is to climb out.
My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.
Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.
He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
Wanting to leave is enough.
I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.
So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word ‘love’ to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.
Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!
Forgiveness doesn’t sit there like a pretty boy in a bar. Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up a hill.
The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it’s almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.
We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap.
I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.
I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.
It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.