Because there is something worse than the I-can’t-live-without-her heartbreak hellspace you’re in right now, Afraid. It’s spending your life with a partner who, at her or his deepest core, does not want to be with you. It’s accepting a reluctant half love for fear that’s all you can get or deserve. It’s dangling eternally in doubt. It’s believing that a lie will keep you safe and the truth is where the danger lies.
But Cheryl wasn’t just trying to shock some callow kid into greater compassion. She was announcing the nature of her mission as Sugar. Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. That was her essential point. Life isn’t some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters – every sin, every regret, every affliction.
Testing yourself means relinquishing the things you believe have so far kept you safe or comfortable.
Difficulty, solitude, and risk are the three things that all rites of passage have in common. It’s because putting ourselves in situations where we must do hard things that scare us without anyone there to intervene pushes us beyond what we previously thought ourselves capable of. It expands our perception of our own courage, strength, and endurance. It forges us out of who we were before into the person we will become.
I had to do something hard so I could know my strength. I had to do something scary so I could find my courage. I had to do something alone so I could see who I was.
The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young,” she wrote. “When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother.
In this sense, she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.
I’ve long believed literature’s greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again.
Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.
A proclamation of love is not inherently “loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.
I am not afraid.
He was once so struck by something I said to him in the course of an argument that he immediately wrote it on a scrap of paper and stuck it to our refrigerator, where it stayed for nearly a decade. The quote? I’m going to be mad at you for the rest of my life.
The sketches of your real life and your sister life are right there before you and you get to decide what to do. One is the life you’ll have; the other is the one you won’t. Switch them around in your head and see how it feels. Which affects you on a visceral level? Which won’t let you go? Which is ruled by fear? Which is ruled by desire? Which makes you want to close your eyes and jump and which makes you want to turn and run?
The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle.
How has your sense of despair contributed to your desire to positively impact your community? How have you countered ugliness by bringing beauty and hope to others through your work? In what ways has your rage, sorrow, and fear illuminated the path forward as you make change in the world? How might you embrace the less-desirable feelings you have about the meaning of your work so they can serve rather than stop you?
Your sense of despair about the meaning of your work sustains itself only if you believe the narrowest version of the story – the one that assumes your contribution to the greater good can be measured by only one result.
The meaning of your work isn’t measured by who won or lost. It’s measured by the world-altering power of your countless good deeds.
The truest story is always the widest one. It’s the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than a straight one. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.
There is always a sunrise and always a sunset. It’s up to you to be there for it, my mom said a million years ago, when she was alive. I rolled my eyes then, a million years ago. Now I live my life by it.
Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.