Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and you too!

Whenever I have trouble standing up for myself (it’s happened), I think about whether I would tolerate the situation if it were happening to one of my sisters, mother, daughter, or niece. If it’s not acceptable for them, it’s not acceptable for me.

For the record, I would like to state that never in the history of humankind has a woman been told to calm down and then calmed down. We don't like that

No person is just one thing. People can be filled with light and affection and also be tortured and conniving and dishonest. Happiness can coincide with great pain. One can lead while also following, the same way one can follow while also leading.

Time speeds up as it goes by. Someone explained to me that there is a mathematical reason for this: as you age, each year becomes a smaller percentage of the life you have already lived. I’m forty-two as I write this. One year now represents a small percentage of my forty-two years (about 2.38 percent). But when I was eight, one year was a really long time; it was an eighth of my life. (This is why summer lasted about four years when you were a kid.) This may be why I now feel an urgency to know more, to do more, to be more.

Back to my midlife crisis. There is a line I had written down from Viktor Frankl’s memoir about surviving the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, that stopped me cold when I read it: “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” I had never thought about what life expected from me. I had only thought about what I expected from life. That was a book putter-downer. It was a look up at the sky and wonder Where the fuck have I been all my life? moment.

Everything with me had always been black and white. Life or death. I wanted more gray. I wanted to learn how to forgive.

Treat yourself the way you treat the person you love most in the world. Get on your own team.

I define me. No event or person does this. I define me. I decide who I am and how I'm going to behave, and I choose to be better. To look more carefully, to trudge deeper. To think about other people's past and not judge someone for doing or handling something differently than I would. To understand my limitations, my shortcomings - that is my growth edge.

I learned that adventure is never bad, but the alacrity with which you go through life has an impact on the wisdom that life has to offer you. That slowing down doesn’t mean you have to do less. It means you have to pay attention more and catch what the world is throwing at you. That every situation you put yourself in deserves your full attention, and that each of us has a responsibility to be more aware of ourselves and of others.

Go after happiness like it is the only thing you can take with you when you die.

Death is agony. There is simply no other way to describe it. It is getting the wind knocked out of you over and over again, and just when you think you have enough strength to take a deep breath, it knocks you down again. There is no break from the pain. It is arduous, unyielding.

I had to leave my parents to love them again. I had to move across the country to appreciate that I actually had any pull toward them - that I needed them. I had to get away from them in order to come back to them. I'd like to say they did the best they could, but that couldn't have been their best. I wasn't doing my best either, so the idea that everyone is always doing the best they can is a trope. Some people are just interested in surviving; doing their best doesn't even occur to them.

Judging other people had become my way of avoiding judgment of myself, and I had to do better than that.

I read somewhere that in order to be of use to others, you need to clean out your own injuries.

Never in the history of humankind has a woman been told to calm down and then calmed down. We don't like that.

Real generosity is also showing up when you don’t feel like it—sacrificing your own happiness in exchange for someone else’s.

I’ve learned that many people are just bridges to someone else. Some people become bridges that you take back and forth to get back to yourself. That’s how I interpret self-defining relationships. The people who bring you back to you. The ones who say, “You are always welcome here. You are family. I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so get used to it.” My father’s funeral was a reminder of how important family is, and how important tradition is. That showing up for a funeral is tradition, and that tradition is not a trope and that there’s nothing stale about it.

My dad’s funeral was one of those instances when you’re reminded of what it means to show up for people. The tradition

Older dogs are special because they have had more rejection. Their hope is gone and, even though no one seems to know exactly how old any rescue dog is, when you adopt an older dog you are cramming their last years with love and giving them the security that comes with knowing they have a home.

I didn't know that my brother's death was defining me. I didn't know that I had the ability to say no to being defined by death. Now I was with a person who could help me process what happened and turn the parts of me that acted like a nine-year-old into a self-actualized adult who had come to a better understanding of what it means to dig deep and admit your pain - thereby beginning the process of relinquishing it.

The people who live in sadness tend to be depressives and can struggle with that their entire lives. They typically have huge amounts of empathy for others. These people also tend to love animals more than the average person loves animals. They are sensitive to others and are typically great listeners, but again, they can also have serious issues with depression.

Awesome,” I told him. “I felt defensive at first, like I hadn’t done anything worth apologizing for, but I recognized that it wasn’t about my intention; it was about how my action was received. That my action was unwelcome. I get that now, and it didn’t take long for it to click this time.

That's what death is like, though. You can't only cry for two weeks straight. You cry, and then you get tired of crying, and then someone says something, and then you're all laughing, and it feels bad to be laughing, but it also feels so good. Without the laughter, we'd all be dying too.

Why do people show up—if not out of decency, and tradition?

Now that I had a better understanding of why I was so pissed off, I could finally do something about it.

Relationships without hiccups were too boring, so inevitably they had to end. Don't get comfortable. Uncomfortable and not knowing had become my comfort zone. I was always looking for an ultimatum - a way to test someone's commitment, to prove they would disappoint me, and if they didn't do anything wrong, I would find a way to prove they were disappointing before they even had a chance to be.

Whereas siblings tend to police you, cousins are your partners in crime.

He told me that people whose default is fear tend to second-guess everything they do. They tend to be indecisive, and many end up leading very safe lives. They are not interested in risk or adventure—

Obviously, there are other factors, such as nature and nurture, along with all of the events that happen throughout your early childhood and throughout your life that will shape who you become as a person,” he said. “But that anger, sadness, or fear will remain deep in your subconscious, and will dictate how you react to things in your life that don’t go as planned.