they're selling is not real sex. It lacks connection, respect, and vulnerability, which is what makes sex sexy. "This kind of porn is sold by people … - Glennon Doyle

I knew what she'd tell me. She'd say, "Something's off about my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this. I imagine fenceless, wide-open savannas. I want to run and hunt and kill. I want to sleep under an ink-black, silent sky filled with stars. It's all so real I can taste it." Then she'd look back at the cage, the only home she's ever known. She'd look at the smiling zookeepers, the bored spectators, and her panting, bouncing, begging best friend, the Lab. She'd sigh and say, "I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It's crazy to long for what doesn't even exist." I'd say: Tabitha. You are not crazy. You are a goddamn cheetah.

The memos I've written for myself are neither right nor wrong; they are just mine. They're written in sand so that I can revise them whenever I feel, know, imagine a truer, more beautiful idea for myself. I'll be revising them until I take my last breath. I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths. My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation, and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself. The goal is to surrender, constantly, who I just was in order to become who this next moment calls me to be. I will not hold on to a single existing idea, opinion, identity, story, or relationship that keeps me from emerging new. I cannot hold too tightly to any riverbank. I must let go of the shore in order to travel deeper and see farther. Again and again and then again. Until the final death and rebirth. Right up until then.

Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new.