“Words, once released, become permanent residents of other people’s memories. They burrow into consciousness, set up residence in the tender places where identity gets formed, and refuse eviction no matter how desperately we might wish to recall them.”
“Forgiveness isn’t a gift you give to someone else—it’s a key you use to unlock your own prison cell. The miracle of forgiveness isn’t that it changes the past—it changes your relationship to the past.”
“I had crossed into the irreversible country, that territory where what’s done cannot be undone, where words spoken cannot be unspoken. We spend most of our lives believing in the myth of reversibility, but the irreversible country has different laws.”
I was holding on so tightly I was crushing what I was trying to protect. True love is not about keeping someone—it’s about loving them enough to let them choose you freely, repeatedly, without coercion.
We think we want love, and we do, but we also fear it with equal intensity. Being loved dismantles every excuse we’ve constructed for our self-protection. Love forces us to confront the possibility that we might actually be worthy.
Loving someone who can’t love themselves is like trying to fill a bucket with holes in the bottom. The love drains away not because it isn’t real, but because it can’t be held by someone who believes they don’t deserve it.
I have spent decades looking for love in other people’s eyes, searching for my worth in their approval. But the strangest thing about this external search is how it never occurred to me to look in the most obvious place: within myself. Maybe the external search ends when the internal search begins.
The hardest lesson was learning that love is not always the solution—sometimes it’s just the context in which other problems play out. Love cannot cure mental illness, cannot overcome addiction. Sometimes loving someone means accepting that your love cannot save them.
Fear is the most sophisticated prison system ever devised, because it convinces its inmates that the cell is actually sanctuary. I had mistaken this careful smallness for wisdom, this strategic hiding for intelligence. But smallness is not safety—it’s just a different kind of suffering.
Courage isn’t the absence of fear—it’s the decision that something else matters more. The truth is more human and more hopeful: every courageous person I’ve known has been afraid. The difference isn’t that they don’t feel fear—it’s that they’ve found something they fear more.
Curated insights, thoughtfully delivered. No clutter.
