Every girl must decide whether to be true to herself or true to the world.
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I begin to understand that beauty warms people and smart cools people.
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Without beauty, what do I have left to warm people with?
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I wonder which voice is me – the one feeling the feelings or the one scoffing at my own feelings? I have no idea what is real.
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My friend stares at me silently. I can tell by her face that I’ve shared too much. This is not the me who is allowed to speak. This is not my representative.
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We tell our stories. If we don’t feel like smiling, we don’t. Most of us don’t feel like smiling. We’re here because we’re tired of smiling.
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We started out as ultrasensitive truth tellers. We saw everyone around us smiling and repeating ‘I’m fine! I’m fine! I’m fine!’ and we found ourselves unable to join them in all the pretending. We had to tell the truth, which was: ‘Actually, I’m not fine.’ But no one knew how to handle hearing that truth, so we found other ways to tell it.
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This initial numbness and denial is shock and it is a gift. Shock is a grace period. It gives a woman time to gather what she needs around her, before the exhaustion and panic set in like a heavy snow. Shock allows her time to circle her people so that she can enter the hard work of grief, which will require all of her. Shock is the window offered after the fall so a woman can prepare herself for winter.
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I’m not killing myself. I’m just not doing what’s required to live. There has to be a difference.
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I pass six more months of my life this way; half alive. Half alive is all the alive I can take.
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I tell myself that I will do only the next right thing, one thing at a time. I start to think of my life as a path. I can only count on the next step to appear once I’ve committed to the step right before it. I wake up every day and ask myself: What would a sober, normal, grown-up person do next? She would get up and make her bed. She would eat breakfast. She would drink a glass of water. She would shower, then go to work. So I do these things, one thing at a time. And since I am doing the right things, I expect life to start being wonderful.
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People watching porn should not be wearing glasses unless they are sexy librarians.
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I am running a neverending relay race, and since I am the only runner, I keep passing the baton back and forth to myself. My exhaustion is total.
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This day required more than I’m physically and emotionally capable of, while requiring nothing from my brain. I had thoughts today, ideas, real things to say and no one to hear them.
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That’s not my representative. That’s the real me. I want to learn more about me, so I keep writing.
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I feel more like I’m looking into a mirror than I have ever felt looking into an actual mirror. There I am, the inside me, on the outside.
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I feel sick, overly exposed, regretful. I’ve said too much and I want to take it all back.
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A couple crosses the street and I smile and wave them on. I am surprised and proud of my smile. Look at me. The worst has happened and here I am, calmly steering my car, smiling at strangers. This smile is how I know I’ve become two people again. I am the one who has just lost her entire life and I am also her representative—driving, smiling, and waving. I have officially become a We again. Pain splits us into two. When someone who is suffering says, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ it is not because she is fine, it is because her inner self told her outer self to say the words ‘I am fine.’ Sometimes she will even slip and say, ‘We’re fine.’ Others assume she’s referring to herself and her people, but she is not. She is referring to both of her selves: her hurt self and her representative, the one fit for public consumption. Pain transforms one woman into two so that she has someone to walk with, someone to sit with her in the dark when everyone else leaves. I am not alone. I have my hurt self, but I also have this representative of me. She will continue on. Maybe I can permanently hide my hurt self and send our rep out into the world and she can smile and wave and carry on as if this never happened. We can breathe when we get home. In public, we will just pretend forever.
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Her pain will also be her comfort. It will be all she has left. Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. – Love Warrior, Glennon Doyle Melton