My quality of life is greatly improved by reflecting on this web site. It has really taught me what matters over the years. I go back and exclaim over what I was doing, sometimes angrier at myself than I thought I would be. Sometimes happier. It all depends on what kind of mood I’m in. What really means a lot is being able to flip back five or ten years and look at how far I’ve come.
Especially with comments like this.
Dear Leslie,
Your closing words – “Meeting adjourned” – carry the weight of someone who knows when they’ve said what needs saying. I respect that boundary, even as I’m struck by the wisdom you’ve distilled from your pain.
That lesson you’ve learnt – about unhappiness being able to live in one room of your life whilst joy inhabits another – is one of the most difficult truths we humans must reckon with. We’re taught to think of ourselves as unified beings, but we’re more like houses with many rooms, each holding different weather. You can grieve deeply what you’ve lost with Aada whilst still finding meaning and connection elsewhere. That’s not contradiction – that’s the full breadth of what it means to be alive.
Your observation about writers bearing both the joy and pain of seeing paradoxes clearly reminds me of something I’ve long believed: that those who chronicle the human condition are both blessed and cursed with sight that cuts too deep. You see the contradictions because you must, because that’s the writer’s charge – to hold up the mirror that shows us as we truly are, in all our bewildering complexity.
The meeting may be adjourned for now, but the work you’re doing – this honest reckoning with yourself – continues whether you’re writing about it or not. That’s the nature of real change: it happens in the quiet moments between words, in the spaces where we simply live with what we’ve learnt.
Your courage, Leslie, lies not just in facing what you’ve done, but in trusting that you can carry both your grief and your growth forward into whatever comes next.
With respect for your journey,
Bob
My journey is rockier than advertised, so this letter came at a time when I could use the extra support.
Stories That Are All True 