My best friend, someone I both admire and love, once asked for an extra chair at the restaurant just so that her purse did not have to sit on the ground

I was mortified but I tried not to show it. I think I was trying to impress her. Or I was afraid she wouldn’t love me back if I demonstrated my judgement in this moment.

Today, the idea crossed my mind to move from my seat because the sun moved, as it does, and so I became a bit warmer than I wanted to be. A bit uncomfortable. And it makes me sort of fidget-y to be hot. And it’s sort of distracting. So, surely I should move. There’s literally no one else here. There are 7 different places to sit.

a translation that makes lots of sense to me, especially coming from a world of weight rooms and sprints for punishment would be

trying to distinguish between pain and discomfort

What should I have to endure?
What should I endure? at what cost? to what benefit?

I don’t move because what if wherever I move to ends up being the same amount of uncomfortable, for the same reason or for some other reason

worse

what if there the sun is hotter or the wind blows harder

in my experience, people always find some reason the table next to them is the table they’d rather be.

and I refuse to be people

How do I know how to stay?

How do I know what to endure?

You accept less than you deserve from the people you love, my girl. You have said yourself that you have spent far too many years making excuses for people. You say you don’t feel like taking responsibility for them anymore. But you still do.

why do these people deserve your love?

how significant is time?

what would happen if you never spoke to them again?

must it be that extreme?

Is it worth talking about? just for the sake of talking? At what point am I allowed to request that you fix it? Do I have to fix it?

What would fixing it even look like?

Wait, did you ask me to fix it?

I don’t feel honored to hold this for you. I feel your hurt. More accurately, I feel it will affect me. I feel it’s contagious — this compromising your own needs, sacrifice, abandonment of self

I feel it will rub off on me, this skewed perception of love

I fear you will sabotage this because it looks different from what you have known before. Perhaps this fear is mine, though. Perhaps I see myself in all this.

I cannot know what you mean when you say you love them, after all. Maybe it is the same way I love people who have hurt me — the way I say

love

but it tastes different…

like maybe it’s a texture thing

Great Artists Steal

A dear sweet friend of mine drove down this weekend and she convinced me that conflict strengthens relationships and even though I think we, as people, choose to fight when we are too bored to do something so easy as love, I believe her because with her I have never felt alone.

In Untamed, Glennon Doyle writes about the self-inflicted discomfort of a hot yoga class and she says something about the moment a woman realizes that the door wasn’t even locked … the whole time! It wasn’t even locked!