Quotes by Anne Lamott excerpted from Stitches:
A Handbook On Meaning, Hope, and Repair
But then a miracle occurred. The women's movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might work semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got to tell the truth now, that you had to tell the truth if you were going to heal and have an authentic life. They told us that people like me ― i.e., girls ― had all been made to feel crazy, neurotic and hypersensitive; they were mad, too, and finally getting mad was going to help save us, because it allowed our truth to escape from jail.
I saw a button once that said, "I'm not tense. I'm just very, very alert."
The second radical choice I made was to notice and then express the fact that I was filled with rage and grief. Who knew? This was very disloyal to my family, for me to no longer play along with the family plan, but all the ways of pretending that I'd been taught were crippling, life-threatening.
Until I began to deal with my anger and sadness, there had been an invisible Gardol shield between me and life, wild true beautiful hard crazy life. I started to tear the shield down.
I was good at being good at things. I was good at forward thrust, at moving up ladders. You've never heard of forward thrust? It is the most central principle of American life, the necessity to improve your lot and status at any cost, and to stay one step ahead of the abyss that may open suddenly at your heels. Unfortunately, forward thrust turns out to not be helpful in the search for your true place on earth.
But crashing and burning can help a lot. So, too, can just plain running out of gas.
I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way.
I also learned that you didn't come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose ― paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.
But what if the great secret insider-trading truth is that you don't ever get over the biggest losses in your life? Is that good news, bad news, or both?
The good news is that if you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever.
This is also the bad news, not because your heart will continue to hurt forever, but because grief is so frowned upon, so hard for even intimate bystanders to witness, that you will think you must be crazy for not getting over it. You think it's best to keep this a secret, even if it cuts you off from certain aspects of life, like, say, the truth of your heart, and all that is real.
The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to.
Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches.
Only together do we somehow keep coming through unsurvivable loss, the stress of never knowing how things will shake down, to the biggest miracle of all, that against all odds, we come through the end of the world, again and again ― changed but intact (more or less). Emerson wrote, "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." I hate this idea more than I can capture in words, but insofar as I have any idea of "the truth," I believe this to be as true as gravity and grace.
Helen was proof that in the cold wind, if you can lean against others, none of you will blow away. You keep each other from falling or help each other get back up. Someone holds out a hand, or even scared old you may hold out a hand, and a person in need reaches for it and hangs on.
... Friendliness is a great blessing when ordinary life for someone is extraordinarily weird.
When we try to see a damaged person as one of God's regular old customers, instead of a lost cause, it take the pressure off everybody. We can loosen our death grip on the person, which usually results in progress for everyone, also known in certain circles as grace.
The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?
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