a book review

Day 63

I finished the book I was reading that I started when the havoc created with corona virus in our country. 21 people died today. This may go for a while. Maybe I'd be 26/28/30 and still be dealing with this. This is the new normal now. Social distancing, staying home, economic recession, news headlines about deaths and infected and survivors. In this hardest of times, the only thing that could soothe the soul, is reading a book that speaks to me. And this particular book spoke to me, when I was torn apart, when I was going through his resentment of me, when I relapsed, when he started being nice again and then again distant and I had to make up my mind, I have to be my own person, my own attention giver and this author and her words spoke to me. Took me into a space where everyone was silent and my nerves where silenced and I just hung on to the most powerful words she might've said and I felt it so deeply and read out each sentence like poetry and like some sacred bible of healing. The book's name is Tiny Beautiful Things and it is collection of correspondence of an online column and the author's name is Cheryl Strayed. The thing I liked about this book is that it was so realistic, and came from real life events, that took part in both the author's and the correspondences lives. Here are some parts I highlighted in the book and would try to adhere to as my own values:

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring.

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That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.

Say thank you.

I had that feeling you get—there is no word for this feeling—when you are simultaneously happy and sad and angry and grateful and accepting and appalled and every other possible emotion, all smashed together and amplified. Why is there no word for this feeling?

We want to believe healing is purer and more perfect, like a baby on its birthday. Like we’re holding it in our hands. Like we’ll be better people than we’ve been before. Like we have to be.

We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait

This is not because he doesn't love you. But love doesn't make a mean drunk not a mean drunk or a narcissist nor a narcissist .

We are complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes.

Most people don't cheat because they're cheaters. They cheat because they are people. They are driven by hunger or for the experience of someone being hungry once more for them. They find themselves in friendships that take an unintended turn or they seek them out because they're horny or drunk or damaged from all the stuffs they didn't get when they were kids. There is love. There is lust. There is opportunity, there is alcohol. And youth. There is loneliness and boredom and sorrow and weakness and self-destruction and idiocy and arrogance and romance and ego and nostalgia and power and need. There is compelling temptations of intimacies with someone other than the person with whom one is intimate. 

The fact that we don’t know is feminism’s one true failure. We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades, but we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans. There are a lot of reasons for this, a whole bunch of Big Sexist Things We Can Rightfully Blame. But ultimately, like anything, the change is up to us.