On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard

Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.

May I have the courage to be who I say I am.

In life, we have so much shit and we constantly collect new shit on top of the old shit and we mostly don't even remember the shit we already have... Isn't it funny how we house so much crap that we aren't even consciously aware of? We do the same thing inside our bodies. So much pain piled on top of pain and memories on top of memories that we just shut the door to our minds and pretend there is nothing in there. That we are fine.

While I was still waitressing, I went to see Wayne Dyer speak and he asked the question I've tried to live by: "Who would you be if nobody told you who you were?

Sick equaled thin and thin got me noticed. Being noticed made me feel loved.

At the end of my life, when I say one final What have I done?, let my answer be, I have done love.

But mostly in those years, I learned how easy it is to confuse grief for body fat, your job for your worth, your lack of knowing who you are with the fact that you are nobody and nothing.

And so escape and love became intertwined, and from this grew a sense of not knowing, ignoring, pretending not to know... Anything I felt--grief, depression, shock, anger--I simply starved it away or exercised or drank too much wine or slept. I simply would not know. It was something I learned as a child that had somehow carried me into adulthood. Until it would no longer carry me. Until I learned to look deep into the face of whatever it was, and what I found was this: it didn't kill me.

Buy your fear a cup of coffee and show it how it’s done.

It comes down to this: your pain comes in waves, it turns, leaches into things. Years of your life, for example. Your pain wraps itself around whole years like a tentacle and won't let go until you understand that it is an organ of touch, so you reach out and touch it and then, only then, it slithers off, as if all it needed was to be noticed.

What would I not realize until my forties was that the moon is never missing any of itself. We just can't see it. People are like that, too.

So let your mind be open and go ahead and buy milk at the store, and every once in a while when you feel a pang in your heart or a splurge of oh my god in your bones, please understand it is your life, trying to be remembered.

Ah! The date my father died. A voice that either belongs to me or doesn't speaks inside my mind. This is why I love yoga: it unburies the sound of things you have buried in your body. It's the body that remembers. Always. It's the mind that cannot be trusted. The mind will tell you it has forgotten.

I think about the wrong turns I've made, which, who's to say if they were wrong or not?

Don't wait for the coffee or the eggs or the shmuck in the front row to tell you how it is. You'll wait your whole life and then end up in an embankment with a heart full of sorrow and I could have done it betters. The way I see it, time is a con artist. The con artist telling you that this isn't a good time, you should wait. The right time will never exist. Like so many of the things we think are perfect and in the end turn out to be just ordinary.

If I could measure my life in moments of self-doubt, it would look like yardstick after yardstick of questioning my choices. From what I order for dinner in a restaurant to whether or not I should have a baby... Choose A. Obsess that I should have chosen B instead of A. Why do I always choose the wrong thing?

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

There are little beauties everywhere. We just have to look for them. And then when we find them, we have to keep them close, even when they or drift off to sea, and that isn't hard, really, when you think about it, because everything always leads to something else and when you feel sad and empty and like it all means nothing, you might look out and see two shopping carts and you might remember: I just have to look, listen, and tell the truth and the beauty will be there. That's what beauty hunting is.

And then there's this: no matter how many bullshit stories you have or don't have, there are no guarantees in life. Nothing is owed to us. That "not knowing" is scary, but the tools to help us--writing, breathing, yoga, connecting--are all we have. And honestly, sometimes the tools are Netflix and coffee as well as breathing and yoga and writing. But we must have tools.

It was then that I decided to thank you to my past. Thanks to all the weirdos and inappropriate old men, and also thank you to all the kind people... Thank you to the lady who told me she thought I would have made something of myself by now. Thank you to the people who paid attention. And those who didn't.

It was as if I finally understood what being present meant. I had heard it so many times in yoga classes but I had never experienced it. It was like a protective film that someone had forgotten to take off was peeled back from my brain, and I could finally see things clearly. How I wasn't truly stuck.

And in the way fate works, the cruel and funny asshole that it can be, my father withheld love from my mom and my mom did whatever she could to get it, a replica of the environment she had growing up.

They helped me understand that what lived in my body needed a way out. Writing was the way out, just as yoga had been the way in.

I decided not to listen to the one out of the one hundred. Sometimes the one is your own IA, sometimes it's someone else. There will always be the one who doesn't like you, the one who says, No, you should not do this, Yes, you suck. And we always always have two choices: keep going or shut down.

Sure, once I published a piece or once I closed my notebook and left the cafe or stopped daydreaming, I was scared again, but while I was writing, while I was telling the truth, I was unafraid. I wanted that again. Fearless-ish. Afraid and not afraid. Scared and doing it anyway. Holding more than one thing. Two things at once.

I was living in a desert of lack and a city of not-enoughness. I listened to Wayne speak and wondered, What if there really was enough? And what if I am enough? And, oh my god, I have been such an asshole for so long.

find a mantra, or mind tattoo, that opens them up as opposed to shutting them down.