I’m sitting here on my all-too-short lunch break, dreaming of the magical Central Coast. I had such a perfect, peaceful weekend with my lady friends at the Madonna Inn (#bucketlist), dear reader, and I’m feelin’ mighty reflective.
Listen, if you’re reading this right now and happen to be in a dark place, I get it—I’m sure you’re just fucking TICKLED that I had a perfect, peaceful weekend. Delighted, even. I know, and I’m sorry. Even still, this feels important to share. Because I DID have a perfect, peaceful weekend, and feeling peaceful is still pretty darn novel to me.
I’m not trying to get all Anne Lamott on your ass (mad love to you always, Anne), and I certainly don’t think that I’m the first person to emerge from a dark place with a little tale to tell, but I do think that our stories are important. They’re not just important—they’re everything. Sharing our stories of who we are with each other is the most powerful way that we connect as human beings—and as far as I’m concerned, that’s really all we’re doing here on planet Whatever. Connecting. Trying to connect. Failing to connect and then trying again.
I’m not even saying that I’m any good at it. I’m fucking not. I’m still a bit awkward, a bit detached, a bit dissociated, a bit guarded. All of that. I’m all of that. I’m just saying that I’ve been doing the fucking work. I’ve been doing so much schlepping and heavy lifting that, at some point, I stopped realizing that’s what it was. All of it—the writing, the truth-telling, the digging, the rearranging, the discarding—it just became what I do. Somewhere along the line, what started out as a sweaty-palmed, heart-racing scramble to survive (and I swear to God there were days where it felt like my lungs were filling with water) became a steady walk.
Love doesn’t happen when you stop looking for it; love happens when you have made space for it.
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I Still Read Your Horoscope 