The only constant family rule is that everyone has to keep showing up.
Books are how I learned to disappear, to live in a world other than the uncomfortable physical one.
I have decided that I’m ready to stop destroying myself and start creating. I have already accepted my invitation and no one will convince me again that I’m not worthy. Not ever again. I have been invited and I have said Yes. My Yes is final.
By the time we landed in the hospital, most of our families considered us insensitive liars, but we didn’t start out that way. We started out as ultrasensitive truth tellers. We saw everyone around us smiling and repeating “I’m fine! I’m fine! I’m fine!” and we fund ourselves unable to join them in all the pretending. We had to tell the truth, which was: “Actually, I’m not fine.
I’d like to be kind, and at the very least not add to people’s pain.
She is trying to be brave, but no one knows what brave looks like inside this particular moment.
This is the difference between God and booze. God requires something of us. The booze numbs the pain but God insists on nothing short of healing. God deals only with truth and the truth will set you free, but it will hurt so badly first. Sobriety will be like walking toward my own crucifixion. that what it will take though. That’s what it will take to rise.
He is human. I hadn’t wanted him to be human. I had wanted him to be perfect and golden – steady and solid, simple and strong – so that I could be messy, complicated, and weak. But we are each all of those things.
This initial numbness and denial is shock and it is a gift. Shock is a grace period. It gives a woman time to gather what she needs around her, before the exhaustion and panic set in like a heavy snow. Shock allows her time to circle her people so that she can enter the hard work of grief, which will require all of her. Shock is the window offered after the fall so a woman can prepare herself for winter. Two.
I’m not big on advice, mainly because most days I learn what an idiot I was yesterday.
They wanted to adore me and I complicated things by inserting myself into their experience of me. I.
Don’t ask, “What can I do?” She doesn’t know. Just do something.
Just do the next right thing, one thing at a time.
You are my beloved! I made you and everything you have ever been or are or will become is already approved. Nothing you can ever do will make me love you more, and nothing you can ever do will make me love you less. That is finished. So stop hiding, stop waiting, and come now! Just get up and dance with me!
It strikes me that it’s always religious people who are most surprised by grace.
I’m trying to strip myself down to my barest essentials so I can figure out where I begin and where the woman the world told me to be begins. I’m going back to the starting line.
Having something to say and no one to hear it is so lonely.
Are we ever ready for the terrifying gifts life offers us?
I promised myself it would all be okay if I followed three simple rules: Show Up, Be Brave, and Be Kind. No.
Grieving with another person is one of the holiest places to be.