Be Your Own Best Friend

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

“Life is weird and love is weirder,” I typed to a man I haven’t seen in months, in part because I’ve been seeing someone else and in part because of irreconcilable differences in values and extraordinarily opposing ideas about what constitutes a good life. He reached out to say, “Hey, no hard feelings but I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” a sentiment I had only assumed was true, given the radio silence. My time with him was brief but nice, and our parting ways was inevitable and mutual. I went on my merry way, enjoyed the Christmas holiday, and haven’t thought about it since. But recently, a good friend had a bad breakup and I found myself typing the same thing, “Life is weird and love is weirder.” She was doing the thing a lot of us do in the aftermath of a breakup: searching for closure, trying to make sense of it all, and rationalizing how or why it ended.

Sometimes life is the pits and sometimes it’s amazing. Sometimes love lasts and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes growing is painful and sometimes it’s necessary. Her heartache wasn’t soothed much by my oh-so-sage advice. What I (badly) trying to tell her is that life is weird but that’s okay. And if you’re okay with you, life’s weird little disappointments won’t feel quite so bad. Life is is weird and love is weirder and we’re all doing the best we can (mostly).