…we’re told by TV and Reader’s Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change–and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we’ve missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.
TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age … pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.
I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.
She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?
We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.