In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

When I woke the next morning in my room at White's Motel, I showered and stood naked in front of the mirror, watching myself solemnly brush my teeth. I tried to feel something like excitement but came up only with a morose unease. Every now and then I could see myself-truly see myself-and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was 'the woman with the hole in her heart'. That was me.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.

If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.