Came across this at work today.

"If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it."

David Foster Wallace

I worry that I am settling instead of striving. I worry that this is indicative of laziness, or of letting fear get the better of me, or of lack of courage. I keep reducing my small "successes" to nothingness and thinking too much of that damn "potential" that everyone talks about. And what if I should never move beyond this stasis? The thought is too much to bear.

"The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who we are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without."

- Joan Didion

I lost my self-respect a while ago. But I think I found it again. I was looking for validation in all the wrong places, but I'm learning.

Life is good.

So far away, doesn't anybody stay in one place any more?

Missing my faraway friends a lot tonight. Everyone I went to elementary and high school with did a really good job of getting away from here. My oldest, best, and favorite friends are in North Jersey, Colorado, Los Angeles, Pearl Harbor, Chicago, Virginia, Florida, Philadelphia. And my college friends are scattered around New Jersey and up and down the coast. I feel really close to everyone in spirit tonight, but so far away at the same time. I hate how much I miss people, no matter how close of far they are from me, all the time. The older we grow, the more I miss my friends, and my memories of them. Everything hurts tonight.

For me, one of the most difficult things about coping with the loss of a person, in any sense, is dealing with the fact that you can no longer share your life with that person, or share that person's life. It's wanting to tell them good news and not being able to. It's wanting to ask advice about a problem and not having them there. It's wanting to hear how they're doing and not being able to ask. Losing a person is losing the ability to share, losing the privilege of it. In that sense, it may be a selfishness you might never have intended for yourself.

I hate being selfish. Even if it's for the best.