- If you asked me to draw a picture of myself I’d draw two. One would be a portrait of a happy, self-confident, regular-looking woman and the other would be a close-up of a giant gaping mouth that’s ravenous for love. Many days I have to silently say to myself: It’s okay. You are loved. You are loved even if some people don’t love you. Even if some people hate you. You are okay even if sometimes you feel slighted by your friends or you sent your kids to school someplace that someone else would not send her kid or you wrote something that riled up a bunch of people. your invisible inner terrible someone
- We don’t know—as a culture, as a gender, as individuals, you and I. The fact that we don’t know is feminism’s one true failure. We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades, but we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans. There are a lot of reasons for this, a whole bunch of Big Sexist Things We Can Rightfully Blame. But ultimately, like anything, the change is up to us. tiny revolutions
- Stop worrying about whether you’re fat. You’re not fat. Or rather, you’re sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea. tiny beautiful things
- You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart. tiny beautiful things
- There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness. tiny beautiful things
- You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else. Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. tiny beautiful things
- Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you. tiny beautiful things
- The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming. tiny beautiful things
- You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to be “hot” in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don’t have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits. You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, I’m right here. tiny revolutions
- There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It’s the one place we can’t leave. We’re there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn’t, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn’t do that? That’s the question you need to answer, Wanting. That’s what will bring your deepest desires into your life. Not: will my old, droopy male contemporaries accept and love the old, droopy me? But rather: what’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin? What fruits would that particular liberation bear? tiny revolutions
- I know as women we’re constantly being scorched by the relentless porno/Hollywood beauty blow-torch, but in my real life I’ve found that the men worth fucking are far more good-natured about the female body in its varied forms than is generally acknowledged. Naked and smiling, is one male friend’s only requirement for a lover. Perhaps it’s because men are people with bodies full of fears and insecurities and shortcomings of their own. Find one of them. One who makes you think and laugh and come. Invite him into the tiny revolution in your beautiful new world. tiny revolutions
- It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep. like an iron bell
- The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it. like an iron bell
- You aren’t afraid of love, sweet pea. You’re afraid of all the junk you’ve yoked to love. And you’ve convinced yourself that withholding one tiny word from the woman you think you love will shield you from that junk. But it won’t. We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright—to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying. like an iron bell
- There’s a saying about drug addicts that they stop maturing emotionally at the age they started using and I’ve known enough addicts to believe this to be true enough. I think the same thing can happen in a long-time monogamy. Perhaps some of your limited interpretations about what it means to say the word love are leftover from what you thought it meant all those years ago, when you first committed yourself to your ex-wife. That was the past, as you say, but I suspect that a piece of yourself is still frozen there. like an iron bell
- A proclamation of love is not inherently “loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.” The terms you agree to in any given relationship are connected to, but not defined by whether you’ve said “I love you” or not. I love you can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful and I’m going to do everything in my power to be your partner for the rest of my life. It can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful but I’m in transition right now, so let’s go easy on the promises and take it as it comes. It can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful but I’m not interested in a commitment with you, now or probably ever, no matter how groovy or beautiful you continue to be. The point is: you get to say. You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings for this woman. You get to describe the particular kind of oh-shit-I-didn’t-mean-to-fall-in-love-but-I-sorta-did love you appear to have for her. Together, the two of you get to come to grips with what it means to have an exclusive, nicely clicking, non-committed commitment in the midst of her bitter divorce and in the not-too-distant wake of your decades-long marriage. Do it. Doing so will free your relationship from the tense tangle that withholding weaves. Do you realize that your refusal to utter the word love to your lover has created a force field all its own? Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will. We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime. like an iron bell
- "What's important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision the commission made up. It's up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that." no mystery about sperm
- You're going to be all right. And you're going to be all right not because you majored in English or didn't and not because you plan to apply to law school or don't, but because all right is almost always where we eventually land, even if we fuck up entirely along the way. the future has an ancient heart
- You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all. the future has an ancient heart
- The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours/feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will." the future has an ancient heart
- Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking "if there were a god, why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life-threatening surgery?"--understandable as that question is--creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising--the very half that makes rising necessary--is having first been nailed to the cross. the human scale
- there are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. dont let a man who doesnt love you be one of them."
- Don't do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don't stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don't fight when you know you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don't focus on the long-term fallout. Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore. Don't seek joy at all costs. I know it's hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it's not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do--have an affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don't think there's a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself--as I did every damn time--the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I'm learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I've still got work to do." --pg 287 Tiny beautiful things, "put it in a box and wait"
- I think the answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we're angry or scared or in pain. We are complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes." -pg 287, tiny beautiful things
- This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times." a bit of sully in your sweet
- You appear to be focused on infidelity as the 'deal-killer' that you believe would compel you to 'automatically dissolve' your own future marriage, and that's fair enough. I understand the icky place in your gut where that impulse lives. There is probably nothing more hurtful and threatening than one partner breaking from an agreed-upon monogamous bond. A preemptive ultimatum against that allows at least the sense of control. But it's a false sense.
- Painful as it is, there's nothing more common in long-term relationships than infidelity in its various versions (cheated, pretty much cheated, cheated a tiny bit but it probably doesn't quite count, came extremely close to cheating, want to cheat, wondering about what it would be like to cheat, is flirting over email technically even cheating? etc.)
- ...if you really want to live happily ever after, if you honestly want to know what the secret to sustaining a lifelong "healthy love" is, it would be a good idea to openly grapple with some of the most common challenges of doing so, rather than pretending that you have the power to shut them down by making advance threats about walking out, "no conversation required," the moment a transgression occurs.
- ...most people don't cheat because they're cheaters. They cheat because they are people. They are driven by hunger or for the experience of someone being hungry once more for them. They find themselves in friendships that take an unintended turn or they seek them out because they're horny or drunk or damaged from all the stuff they didn't get when they were kids. There is love. There is lust. There is opportunity. There is alcohol. And youth. There is loneliness and boredom and sorrow and weakness and self-destruction and idiocy and arrogance and romance and ego and nostalgia and power and need. There is the compelling temptation of intimacies with someone other than the person with whom one is most intimate.
- ..which is a complicated way of saying, it's a long damn life...And people get mucked up in it from time to time. Even the people we marry. Even us. You don't know what it is you'll get mucked up in yet, but if you're lucky, and if you and your fiance are really right for each other, and if the two of you build a marriage that lasts a lifetime, you're probably going to get mucked up in a few things along the way." a bit of sully in your sweet
- Sometimes the thing you fear the most in your relationship turns out to be the thing that brings you and your partner to a deeper place of understanding and intimacy." a bit of sully in your sweet
- I teach memoir-writing occasionally. I always ask my students to answer two questions about the work they and their peers have written: What happened in the story? and What is this story about? You get no points for living, I tell my students. It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means. This is also true in life. Or at least it's true when one wishes to live an ever-evolving life. What this requires of us is that we don't get tangled up in the living, even when we in fact feel woefully tangled up. It demands that we focus not only on what's happening in our stories, but also what our stories are about. Opt to transcend-to rise above or go beyond the limits of-rather than living inside the same old tale. I know you know what it means to transcend, but the thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going." transcend
- We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there...grateful for the smallest things." the ordinary miraculous
- We all like to think we are right about what we believe about ourselves and what we often believe are only the best, most moral things. We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. but the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. It's the reason we have to fight so viciously over the decapitated head of the black-haired plastic princess before we learn how to place nice; the reason we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came closest to ending. -this is what we call a clusterfuck
oct 1 2013 ∞
jan 25 2014 +
jan 25 2014 +