I know why women don’t speak out. It’s hard enough just to survive.
The answer wasn’t to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could.
This is what it means to be fully alive. To feel it all – the joy and the sorrow, the hope and the fear. This is what life demands of us. You just have to stay, and try, and let life break your heart.
Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.
All the hardships and insults and disappointments in life didn’t make this one blissful moment less important. They made it more. They made it matter. The very fact that it couldn’t last was that reason to hold on to it – however, we could.
All I knew was that watching your children survive their childhoods was so much worse than surviving your own.
People who wanted to wrestle with complicated emotions became therapists, or poets. People who wanted to keep things simple became firefighters.
I knew too much about life to pretend that it wasn’t half tragedy. We lose the people we love. We disappoint each other. We misunderstand. We get lost and lonely and angry. But right now, in this moment, we were okay.
I’ve spent so much time wishing that what happened never happened. But it did. And the question I try to focus on is, What now?
They will ignore you. They will exclude you. They will resent you. Being nice won’t help. Working hard won’t matter. Just by your very presence there, you are attacking them, trying to steal something that’s rightfully theirs, trying to infiltrate and dismantle their brotherhood.
I think just because you can’t keep something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it. Nothing lasts forever. What matters is what we take with us.
You can’t make people love you. But you can give the love you long for out to the world. You can be the love you wish you had. That’s the way to be okay. Because giving love to other people is a way of giving it to yourself.
It doesn’t hurt to spend your life with people who see what’s great about you – in a way that you maybe never would have on your own. The people we love to teach us who we are.
I wondered if having faith in yourself was just deciding you could do it – whatever it was and then making yourself follow through.
Maybe love isn’t a judgment you render – but a chance you take. Maybe it’s something you choose to do over and over. For yourself and everyone else.
People who want to be famous think it’s the same thing as being loved, but it’s not. Strangers can only ever love a version of you. People loving you for your best qualities is not the same as people loving you despite your worst.
And loving other people really does turn out, in the end, to be a genuine way of loving yourself.
Every chance you take is a choice. A choice to decide who you are.
And I guess there really is something profoundly healing about letting somebody love you.
The people we love help teach us who we are. The best versions of who we are, if we’re lucky.