To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.

It’s not a coincidence that you describe your pain as being lodged in your chest. When you breathe with calm intention you’re zapping the white rage monster precisely where it lives. You’re cutting off its feeding tube and forcing a new thought into your head—one that nurtures rather than tortures you. It’s essentially mental self-discipline. I’m n

In this sense, she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright—to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

The point is, Johnny, you get to say. You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings for this woman. You get to describe the particular kind of oh-shit-I-didn’t-mean-to-fall-in-love-but-I-sorta-did love you appear to have for her.

think it would help you to lean rather hard into the rational right now. Not to deny your grief, but rather to put into perspective what seems to be most true: your father didn’t manage to be a good husband to your mother in the end, but that doesn’t mean he won’t manage to be a good father to you.

It’s communion and mellow compatibility. It’s friendship and mutual respect. It’s not having to say we must have an “absolute restriction on each other” for thirty days. That isn’t love, Lusty Broad. It’s a restraining order. You don’t have intimacy with this woman. You have intensity and scarcity. You have emotional turmoil and an overwrought sens

If you’d like to become the emotionally evolved man it seems so very clear to me that you are on the brink of becoming, you’re going to have to evolve beyond asking every kitten you meet if she’s your mother. She isn’t. You are.

“The Gift of the Magi”—each of us making a sacrifice that nullified the gift of the other. I