Justine

“People always say that it’s good to feel your feelings, that if you don’t feel them now, they’ll come out later. But throughout this crisis, I have yet to see hers come out. And who’s to say what it means to handle something well? Here I am with a full emotional range, and I’m paralyzed. Meanwhile, my mother is staying very busy with her business, the house, financial stuff. Some days I think she’s headed for a fall. Most days, I feel like she’s handling this well—and that her lack of an emotional response is proof that something is wrong with me. “Oh my god!” she says. “Oh no!” “What’s wrong?!” “Nothing,” she says. “I just remembered. I have to go to Home Depot and get a hose.”
― Melissa Broder, Death Valley

“You see yourself the way you think the world sees you, so you value yourself only when you are accomplishing and producing and finishing and succeeding. If you can’t value yourself, then there’s no reason to get up every morning, and if there’s no reason to get up, then . . . what? You feel untethered, as if someone has turned off gravity and you’ve been spun into infinite space, a black hole that demands, WHAT’S THE POINT OF YOU?”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Who were you when you weren’t wondering who you were?”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future. The problem, I now know, is that no one ever really feels wise, least of all those who actually have it in themselves to be so. The Older Self of our imagination never quite folds itself into the older self we actually become. Instead, it hovers in the perpetual distance like a highway mirage. It’s the destination that never gets any closer even as our life histories pile up behind us in the rearview mirror. It is the reason that I got to forty-something without ever feeling thirty-something. It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.”
― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion