But the paradox of pain is that it is only universal in retrospect. In the present, it is fiercely personal.
Stop spending all day obsessing, cursing, perfecting your body like it’s all you’ve got to offer the world. Your body is not your art, it’s your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that you have a paintbrush which can be used to transfer your insides onto the canvas of your life – where others can see it and be inspired and comforted by it.
If you are uncomfortable – in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused – you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.
Do I truly want any of this, or is this what I was conditioned to want? Which of my beliefs are of my own creation and which were programmed into me?
Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I loved well. Here is my proof that I paid the price. So I’ll just show up and sit quietly and practice not being God with her. I’m so sorry, I’ll say. Thank you for trusting me enough to invite me close. I see your pain and it’s real. I’m so sorry.
The girls are silent at first. Then each girl diverts her eyes from the television screen and scans the faces of the other girls. Each looks to a friend’s face to discover if she herself is hungry. Some kind of telepathy is happening among them. They are polling. They are researching. They are gathering consensus, permission, or denial.
I think about the tragedies the women in my life have faced. How every time a child gets sick or a man leaves or a parent dies or a community crumbles, the women are the ones who carry on, who do what must be done for their people in the midst of their own pain.
I was filled with electric thunder, simmering water, fiery red and gold, but all I had to do was smile and nod and the world would take me for easy breezy blue. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn’t the only one using her skin to contain herself. Maybe we are all fire wrapped in skin, trying to look cool.
I am an artist and my medium is me.
I guess women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want.
To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become – to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It is not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to, either.
I understand now that I’m not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world.
If you keep walking – I’m here to stand beside you. If you turn around and run, I’ll follow and we’ll never look back. Whatever you do right now, Sister, you’re fine. I’m here.
His body fills my arms and I think, Oh. So this is what my arms are for.
Chase’s laughter sounds like a waterfall of crystal bubbles. His laugh is like music class when I dragged the felt-tipped xylophone mallet gently from the long, deep bar all the way to the tiny, tinkly one to hear every note in rippled succession.
One night I read this in a book about two lovers: ‘They could have a whole conversation with just one glance between them,’ and it makes my stomach lurch with longing.
Who was I before I started becoming other things?
Friend, I am sober today. Thank God Almighty, I’m sober today. I’m here, friend. Yesterday my son turned ten, which means that I haven’t had a drink for ten years and eight months. Lots of beautiful and horrible things have happened to me during the past ten years and eight months, and I have handled my business day in and day out without booze. GOD, I ROCK.
I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, For the same reason I laugh so often – because I’m paying attention.
The universe had presented me with some very obvious rules for femaleness: Be small and quiet and wispy and stoic and light and smooth and don’t fart or sweat or bleed or bloat or tire or hunger or yearn. But the universe had also already issued me this lumpy, loud, smelly, hungry, longing body – making it impossible to follow the rules.
Depression takes all my vibrant colors and bashes them together until I am gray, gray, gray.