It’s not the child’s responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It’s the parent’s responsibility to learn who the child is.
I start crying when certain things come up, certain memories, certain feelings, and it’s intense. But I think it’s good for me – and therapeutic.
When anything huge happens to me, I always think, this isn’t my moment, this is a moment.
I’m always going to do whatever I think is funniest. If something’s dark, I’ll do it. If it’s a sock puppet, if it’s a stool, I’ll do it.
I didn’t have an interest in school at all and was getting in trouble all the time.
When I couldn’t get ahold of cigarettes, I’d roll coffee grounds into typing paper and smoke that and then vomit.
I am just at tragedy right now.
My age makes all my wrinkles and gray hair make sense.
I’m the luckiest unlucky person.
I worked at restaurants and coffee shops and babysitting and just whatever I could do to make money.
I was talking and playing pranks and skipping school, failing pretty much every class I took.
I was really into music. I started playing guitar also when I was nine. I wanted to be in the Beatles, even though John Lennon died the year I got a guitar and the Beatles broke up before I was born.
The best gift you can give anyone is a well-lived life of your own.
People have such a strong urge to make their mark here on earth, the final one being their tombstone.
While you’re alive, you should feel alive. I thought about how tomorrow or a week from now, or whatever date people tell themselves is the big day – a party, an award show, a holiday – is no more important than the event of today. I thought: “Every day is the day.
The other scary beauty of life, which I probably should have expected to discover in all of this, was how heightened circumstances, such as overlapping tragedy and success, sharpen your vision and shorten your patience for baloney and hogwash.
For the first time, it occurred to me that our mother had birthed for each of us a buddy for life; that even with all the baggage and boundaries that come tangled with adulthood, we would simply always be defenseless children to each other. Delivering.
When you think you have all the time in the world, hanging up on a loved one seems fine, something to fix later.
When I marveled over our compatibility and how easy things were with us, she said she believed that it was true that I loved and cared for her, and she tried always to assume that nothing I said or did was intentionally done to hurt her.
Maybe we had all missed some ambiguous window of time when we could have salvaged some hope for a real connection.
They were my closest friends and were pursuing their dreams of working in film and television, and I was pursuing my dream of someday having a dream.