Treat yourself like someone you love.
Being human in a world with no tolerance for humanity felt like a setup, a game I couldn’t win. But instead of understanding that there might be something wrong with the world, I decided there was something wrong with me.
Also, fancy language tends to make in people feel more in and out people feel more out, and I don’t think that’s how words are best used.
I understand that you can love someone so much it aches and still hurt them, again and again. I know that you can love and betray the very same person.
Now I wonder, is love not a feeling but a place between two present people? A sacred place created when two people decide it’s safe enough to let their real selves surface and touch each other? Is that why it’s called in love? Because you have to visit there?
We can choose to be perfect and admired or to be real and loved.
Some reunions just require a long, kind patience.
Forgiveness and grace are like oxygen: we can’t offer it to others unless we put our masks on first. We have to put our grace masks on and breathe in deep. We have to show them how it’s done. We need to love ourselves if we want our kids to love themselves. We don’t necessarily have to love them more; we have to love ourselves more.
My whole life is an apology, and that hasn’t made a damn thing better.
I’m not killing myself, I think as I open the door. I’m just not doing what’s required to live. There has to be a difference. I.
To arrive inside the moment in which you are supposed to feel more connected than at any other moment of your life and still feel lonely is utterly terrifying. It is the most lonely you can possibly feel. I.
Maybe my reliance on numbing is keeping me from the two things I was born for: learning and loving. I could go on hitting easy buttons until I die and feel no pain, but the cost of that decision could be that I’ll never learn, love, or be truly alive.
Every beautiful thing in life comes out of the mess.
Just as I’d understood the rules for girls, surely he’d absorbed the world’s rules for boys – that emotions are forbidden, that to be a successful boy he needed to ‘buck up and be a man.’ Do girls abandon our bodies because that’s where we’re shamed and boys abandon their emotions because that’s where they’re shamed? Little boy: Don’t feel. Little girls: Don’t hunger.
What else is family if not a commitment to keep showing up?
You have to be known to be loved, and none of these waving people knows me.
We talked about how impossible it is to read minds and hearts and what a relief it is to hear what the person you love needs and learn how to give it.
Who else but a sibling travels with you from the start of life’s path to the bitter end?
If you can feel, then there has been no amputation. If you can feel, you are not too late.
The one closest to the departed has to be the first one to step from despair to hope. Nobody else is allowed to jump ahead and shove open the door. That’s the rule.