a quote i like

"No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)

I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.”
― Adrienne Rich

i read this quote this morning on a friend's facebook status. every time i reread it a different part of the quote stands out to me. 

initially it was the line that says that we need people who we can weep with and they will still count us as warriors. awesome! i'm always worried that if i show weakness my friends will freak out. i think i'm the one at the party that tends to overshare. i take it literally when it says in the Bible we need to bare one anothers burdens. i feel like the one doing most of the bringing of the burdens. i keep trying to convince people that i want to bare burdens too, but maybe i come across a little fragile. i guess i need to think about that some more. 

the second part that stood out to me was in the second paragraph that says if we don't want to give ourselves away we need to make a place that does allow that kind of friendship. matt and i talk about this alot. we talk about how it seems that living in american breeds the mentality that we need to do IT ALL on our own. we need to have a relationship with God on our own, in our own quiet time; we need to deal with pain on our own, in our own prayer time; we need to deal with our rocky marriages alone, in the privacy of our own therapist; we need to deal with our own problems and not talk about them. but this person, adrienne rich who passed away recently at the age of 82, seems to have come to a different conclusion. rather than trying to do it all on our own, she seems to think that if you don't see a space for that mentality you need to create a place so that you don't run the risk of totally giving yourself away. 

so the secret to getting to the end of this life not feeling lost and like i don't know myself anymore is to actually talk about how i am feeling now. what i am experiencing now. the hard things about life now. the things that bring me to my knees and make me weep now. so that at the end of this race known as life i will recognize myself.