archiverssasktheme In all actuality, you reading this is nothing more than just a fleeting moment of coincidental timing at its best. Have a good life. Peace and Love. Always.
U.S. Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib watching Republicans trying to defend Donald Trump at the Cohen hearings.
“I was a teller at a bank. I was working the front and couldn’t talk on the phone, so she sent me a text. She sent two texts actually. The first one said ‘I’m pregnant.’ And the second one said: ‘It’s twins.’ We weren’t even living together at that point. I was only making $28,000 a year. I wasn’t ready. They were born three months premature. But if my wife was scared, she never showed it. She went from nothing to Mom in no time. She told me exactly what to do. It was never domineering. She just knew. The first months were terrible. We were sleeping two hours a night. I was waking up for work at seven. It felt like I was living in a dream state. And I kept thinking: ‘I don’t think I can do this.’ And that feeling stayed for a long time. Things are a bit easier now. But it never feels like I’m done. I go to work, then come home, then it’s homework, then it’s bed. I’m dead tired at the end of the day. I don’t know if I’m doing a good job. I never felt like Dad. I just felt like some figure they called ‘Dad.’ It somehow felt like my wife was their mom, and I was just there for support. I felt like a babysitter. Like I was watching someone else’s kids. I never knew what a dad was supposed to be like. It wasn’t in me. I didn’t know how to show it. I took care of them. I loved them. But I didn’t really hug or kiss them. I wasn’t comfortable with it. Probably because it was never done to me. But I’m different now. I hug and kiss them every night. But that’s because they taught me. They’d come up to me and say ‘Daddy, I love you.’ And they’d hug me and kiss me. So that’s what I do now. But it didn’t come from me. Everything came from them.”
“When the relationship failed, it felt like I had failed. Being a good girlfriend had been so important to me, and I couldn’t succeed at the one thing I put all my energy into. Admittedly I was a very codependent partner, which is something I’m working on. Even after we broke up, I still hung out with him all the time. He saw it as a casual thing, but I was still looking for the validation of being wanted. I felt so lost. All of my life plans had been contingent on the relationship. Finally I moved back to New York, which is where I grew up. At the time it seemed like giving up. I moved in with my parents. My confidence was low. I didn’t think I’d be able to find a job. I went through all the motions but I felt like I was faking it. There was a voice in my head telling me that I didn’t deserve any of the jobs I was applying for. But after months of searching, I just got hired last Friday. I’m going to be a trauma therapist at a victims’ services agency. It’s exactly what I wanted to be doing with my degree. It feels like the start of something. And that’s exactly what I needed. Before coming home, everything felt haunted and attached to him. But up here, everything is completely mine: my job, my schedule, my surroundings. Even coming to Grand Central is something I used to do as a kid, and I’m doing it now, and I’ll continue to do it. It’s connected to my history. And it’s a part of me. And it has nothing to do with him.”
“Attention: deep listening. People are dying in spirit for lack of it. In academic culture, most listening is critical listening. We tend to pay attention only long enough to develop a counterargument; we critique the student’s or the colleague’s ideas; we mentally grade and pigeonhole each other. In society at large, people often listen with an agenda, to sell or petition or seduce. Seldom is there a deep, open-hearted nonjudgmental reception of the other. And so we all talk louder and more stridently and with a terrible desperation. By contrast, if someone truly listens to me, my spirit begins to expand.”
— Mary Rose O’Reilley, Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice (via whentherewerebicycles)
