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as if a coma is just a thing that happens from a lack of something to be excited about in your life.
If there is one thing I could pinpoint as being directly in opposition to my soul, it’s ruffles.
Through writing, I feel power for maybe the first time in my life. I don’t have to say somebody else’s words. I can write my own. I can be myself for once. I like the privacy of it. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s judging. Nobody’s weighing in. No casting directors or agents or managers or directors or Mom. Just me and the page. Writing is the opposite of performing to me. Performing feels inherently fake. Writing feels inherently real.
I know this expression well, the way I know all of Mom’s expressions well. I have learned them inside and out so that I can behave accordingly at all times.
She does well when she has something in my life to look forward to.
Growing is wobbly and full of mistakes, especially as a teenager—mistakes
“Scott Borschetta’s gonna be too busy with that Taylor chick; he won’t have time for you.”
Without her monitoring and weighing in on my every move, my life feels much easier.
Because once the context ends, so does the friendship.
Loving someone is vulnerable. It’s sensitive. It’s tender. And I get lost in them. If I love someone, I start to disappear. It’s so much easier to just do googly eyes and fond memories and inside jokes for a few months, run the second things start to get real, then repeat the cycle with someone new.
I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don’t. And whenever I encounter someone who doesn’t, I disregard them.
So I have to turn down movies while Ariana’s off whistle-toning at the Billboard Music Awards?
And while at first I
was aware of the shift, and concerned, it no longer feels like a shift. It just feels like me.
I’m cemented in people’s minds as the person I was when I was a kid. A person I feel like I’ve far outgrown. But the world won’t let me outgrow it.
These ten pounds are the first thing I notice when I wake up in the morning, the last thing I notice when my head hits the pillow at night, and the thing that I most often notice throughout the course of any given day.
taking in Steven the way I used to take in my mother after any of her brushes with death that she survived. It’s a pure way of taking somebody in. There’s a grateful astonishment. They’re here. They’re still here.
And an umless man isn’t sure of something for no reason. An umless man is sure of things that he is sure of.
That guilt and frustration can be helpful in moving us forward, but shame… shame keeps us stuck. It’s a paralyzing emotion.
The results vary, but the attempts are consistent.
Defining yourself is hard. Complicated. Messy. Letting the number on the scale do it for you is simple. Direct. Straightforward.
He’s so contemplative these days, but in the way that gets you nowhere.
There’s a moment of silence. It’s one of those rare moments where I feel like I didn’t say too much, or too little.
I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her, so I stayed silent.
How many times can you pratfall over a carpet or sell a line you don’t believe in before your soul dies?
