The hardest thing about being an outcast isn’t the love you don’t receive. It’s the love you long to give that nobody wants.
What a desperate, pathetic fool I was. Time after time, my “friends” had shown me their true colors. Yet, I still wanted to believe they were sorry for causing me pain. p. 128.
Am I going to be this way for the rest of my life, always waiting for something bad to happen? Will I never truly be able to trust anyone? I worry that when I’m older, I’ll be so afraid that people won’t like me that I’ll have trouble believing it when they actually do.
You don’t get to pick who you are in this life, but you can decide what you become.
It’s not that bullying is any worse today. The impulse for cruelty is the same impulse. The only difference is that the tools to achieve that have become more sophisticated.
People tend to consider beig vulnerable a bad thing. It’s not. Vulnerability reminds us that we’re human. It keeps us open to giving and receiving love. Without at least a little, we can become someone living n a prison of our own making, where the walls are so thick that no one can get in or out.
I now realize what Dorothy means in the final scene from The Wizard of Oz, when she says that if you have to look beyond your front door for your heart’s desire, perhapsit was never there to begin with. Maybe, like Dorothy, I should embrace the love right in front of me and not search for some elusive dream that never mattered in the first place.