The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.
I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so 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.
Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.
What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.
The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
No’ is golden. ‘No’ is the kind of power the good witch wields. It’s the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.
It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.
Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do what seems like the easiest thing to do – have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.
There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.
You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.
What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?
It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who’d kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.
You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.
But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.
I never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
And so I walked on.
We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.