02 December 2009

real life

i read the following paras exactly when i felt the same way. that is always so relieving, so comforting, so inspiring- that i am not the only one who feels a particular way, and that someone else has penned it down so poetically. thank you ck.

"My friends and i had reached the age when we had the great, good fortune to be living out some of the dreams we'd had when we were young. Now, we were discovering the truly hard part: the realities.

Having a new baby made you psychotic with exhaustion and self-doubt. Professional success could make you delirious with insomnia and anxiety. Living abroad rendered you lonely and infantilized. And no matter what road you took, you still had to brush your teeth every morning, pay your bills, do your damn laundry, worry about taxes, check your breasts for cancer, argue with your loved ones about whether to defrost the refridgerator. Nobody, after all, it seemed, was exempt from banality...

Moments of pure bliss were often accidental. Getting something you'd consciously worked toward, on the other hand, was often far more emotionally complicated."

This is from Susan Gilman's 'hypocrite in a pouffy white dress'. it's a book i would never have picked up on my own, and i probably won't read it from cover to cover, but it has enough truth and sass in it to make me mark pages and laugh at humanity!