It made me miss my mom in a way I never expected. Or maybe not her, exactly – but the person she could have been. The relationship we could have had. I’d always wondered if other people’s mothers were as good as they seemed.
But I find the antidote to that is just keeping a sense of humor. And staying humble. And laughing a lot. And doubling down on smiling. We’re all just muddling through, after all. We’re all just doing the best we can. We’re all struggling with our struggles. Nobody has the answers. And everybody, deep down, is a little bit lost.
Love makes you muddled. Love clouds your judgment. Love derails you with longing.
It really left me thinking about what stories are for.
And the idea that anything could just disappear at any moment is something you suddenly understand in a whole new way.
If we were in England, we could call him a shag bandit.
That day changed my life more than any other ever has.
But now I saw the emotional landscape quite differently – more like the pointillism of a Seurat painting: each color made up of many other colors. Look closely, and it’s dots. Stand back, and it’s an afternoon on the lake – all the colors relying on each other for texture and meaning.
The people we love help teach us who we are.
Usually, when you see people for the last time, you don’t know it’s the last time.
The more good things you look for, the more you find.
Isn’t it lucky when we’re drawn to people who can teach us things we need to learn?
Our thoughts create our emotions. So if you fixate on your worst-case scenario, you’ll make things harder for yourself.
But I guess that’s the great thing about life – it gives you chance after chance to rethink it all. Who you want to be. How you want to live. What really matters.
We could have let it all go long before now. We could have tried less hard. We could have given up in the face of all our misunderstandings. But we didn’t. It takes a certain kind of courage to be brave in love. A courage you can only get better at through practice.
We’re all just doing the best we can. We’re all struggling with our struggles. Nobody has the answers. And everybody, deep down, is a little bit lost.
Was he flirting with me or being a pain? Had he already won me over, or did I still have a choice?
Every real human interaction is made up of a million tiny moving pieces. Not a simple one-note situation: a symphony of cues to read and decipher and evaluate and pay attention.
I thought that the only way to be close was to stay far away.
And the truest thing I knew about myself was this: I was always happy when I was making things.
It’s a big deal to share your grief with other people – to give them a glimpse of the pain you carry.