YOUR PROMPT FOR WEDNESDAY, MAY 27
Here’s a quote from a response to our last prompt from @laurapekuri:
"We tell ourselves stories of permanence and resolution, but the plans we so carefully craft are fragile too. Why must we break so easily and so often?"
This quote reminded us so much of our episode from May 5th, "Life After Certainty." In that episode, Kate Bowler takes on the very ideas she once held dear: “everything happens for a reason” and the notion that being good and doing good can buy our way out of suffering.
So, Terribles, what cliches have you seen busted open and laid bare by reality? What did you once believe that has changed as a result of your lived experience? How has changing those beliefs changed you as a person?
XO,
Team TTFA
My ex-husband recently pointed out to me that my mom and I are not very close. Like, very matter-of-factly. My reflex was to immediately disagree, and I did. It sounded unfamiliar to me and oddly uncomfortable, that declaration he’d made.
And then I stopped and interrupted myself to actually think about it. And he was right.
We are close in age. And in traumas and shared experiences and in the survival of a very broken and destructive man who tried to break us too. Neither of us would have survived that situation without the other. I believe that. And perhaps because I went through all of that as an only child, she was the closest thing I had to a sibling who was going through it too.
And maybe I’ve mistaken those things for closeness, now.
It’s weird, becoming aware of these outside perspectives, learning that they do not at all come close to resembling your own. “My mom and I are close.” It’s a story I’ve told myself my entire life. It’s felt strange yet somehow liberating to let it go.
