Friend: haha I know you like Greek myths. Here’s a funny meme I found about orpheus and eurydice
Me, shaking her by the shoulders: they loved each other so much. Each version of the myth has him turning because how can he not. He loves her too much. It compels him. His love doomed her to die, but how can she complain? How can she complain that someone loved her enough to turn?
Notice: not only do your friends actually like you, they secretly like you twice as much as they let on
An experience that made me feel much more assured in my friendships was at college, a friend and myself were talking about a third friend of ours and how cool and knowledgeable and smart she is and how we feel like we could never be that cool. The next day I was working with a professor on some paper presentations we were about to have and when I came out of the staff room I was informed that these two aforementioned friends were having the same discussion about me. And it turns out we spent a lot of time thinking about our friends who aren’t currently in the room and gushing over how cool and smart and talented they are without being able to say all of it to their face.
Your friends secretly love you a lot more than they already express, just like you love them so intensely that saying it all to their faces would sound clumsy to your own ears. It’s true though
i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you’re also grieving for yourself a little bit
‘There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.’
-Anne Carson, ‘Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides’
Stories are full of impossibilities to teach us to bear the unbearable.
