Boston Toasties, you are wonderful. I am actually moving this week and have had a few people offer to help, which I'm incredibly grateful for. I will take a few of them up on it and it will all get done. But your offer means SO much.
So it's funny. When I need something, it's almost always my overwhelmed and overworked friends who volunteer to help. The loneliness has been really hard for me, too. And I get frustrated that it's like pulling teeth to just meet my married friends for drinks or coffee. So I've started to build my own circle from scratch and gather the fierce people who will drop what they're doing and help and try to build it into something. It's only been a little while, but so far I already feel better and hopeful that maybe I can make that community work.
This hit me so hard, too! It's been trickier because so few people under 40 read him and I don't have a lot of people to share my grief with. But I cried over and over again the morning they announced his death.
Love this. I skipped over the angry atheist phase (I'm still not sure why) in my journey out of Mormonism and pretty quickly settled on Agnostic with Atheist leanings. But Atheists are never satisfied with this answer. When I tell them that as someone who believes in science and data that I can't state anything with certainty when I don't have evidence to back it up, they will not accept this as an answer. It's a weird thing.
I have found so much about morality and bad stuff in my life to be better and easier. There is no more question of why something happened or why my behavior matters. Now I have to find within myself the need to care about other people and be good to them. And now I can see the randomness of the universe and not feel like I brought some bad thing upon myself. It's been incredibly liberating.
Yes yes yes on not-so-NT girls. My daughter was lucky to be #2, and I went through the whole hits-every-box-on-the-list diagnosis with #1, and met a ton of people who were already in the thick of it, and heard a lot about how different girls were and had tons of models. So yeah, I was ready for it with her. She is doing great, even though I still haven't quite figured her out yet. I'm confident we'll get there. Finding a small, trustworthy community of other parents living through diagnosis helped me a ton. Hope you are able to find something like that, Nicole!
Oh there is so much in here that I relate to. If there weren't hymns in church I never would have lasted as long as I did. (At BYU there is such a hymn fandom that every Sunday kids gather in one of the tunnels under a road on campus to sing them. I am not joking. It is called Tunnel Singing and I went almost every week when I was a freshman.) And I remember those prayers and wanting to know it was true but also being scared that I never would.
Such a beautiful piece.
If I had a hard copy of Queen of the Night, I would happily pass it along. But alas. I only have a digital galley that is not share-able. It is, however, worthy of the hype. I kept tweeting tweets of pleasure as I read it.
This makes me want to re-read Hollinghurst right now.
Pretty sure weeping at your desk is the only possible response.
How did you know I'm humming Teach 'em how to say goodbye every time I think about Barack???
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jessicaesquire 
Brainchild