It's hard to tell people about grief. It's hard to talk to people about poverty... and so I'd got very used to the silence in my own life, and my writing is the only thing that allows me to connect with myself.
But there was a kind of corrosive anxiety, I think, about not having more. And you know, in some ways this is a very specific story about one boy who was a fabulist and who died too young. In other ways, I feel as though there are elements of this story that many of us would recognize.
Personally, it was more difficult. So, I lost a lot of friends, a lot of old friends, and that will never stop being painful to be abandoned by people who I'm sure that you have.
the gap between that public self and the messy vulnerability of our private selves is often huge. And that's true whether you're talking about how your life is actually going versus the Instagram post you just put up or that you saw of someone else, or how professional and put together you're seeming on a Zoom call when actually you're not wearing any pants, just out of the frame.
Bad breath is kind of a metaphor for humanness, for being a human being, for loving somebody enough to tell them something that might be painful in the short term but very helpful in the long term.
I'm just offering a glimpse of some of the things that people may not see, of sweaty hands, of anxiety, insecurity, of trying to be someone I'm not, of making mistakes, learning from those mistakes.
