I received an email from a good friend earlier today with a very sweet response to a bit of my ranting, with three words I think we're all familiar with: "You deserve better."

I think we've all said that to someone at some point, or heard it from someone ourselves. You deserve better, and you and you and you--so, in theory, we all deserve better. And yet, we all don't think so either. We're always selling ourselves short, letting others walk all over us in hopes that we can be the bigger person. But sometimes, people just treat others like crap. We all do it, whether it's intentional or not.

Perhaps we should all be striving for the patience and kindness we hope for others to bestow on us so it doesn't matter when we're placed on back burners or ignored, and it doesn't matter when someone makes a promise and forgets. If you put enough good out there in the world, some of it is bound to come back to you someday, right? At least we should all try to live a life that encourages compassion.

There will be people who you choose to invest in who will never take you seriously, never see you as an equal. They will forget the things you say, they will ignore you and choose others they may not really care about because you may demand too much: you may demand respect, and we don't like to be told we haven't been respecting others. They will mistreat you, and you will have a choice to stand up for yourself or not. Most often, we choose to sit back because we want to believe that that person we love cannot be that cruel. At least that's what I want to believe. I want to believe people are inherently good, and if that makes me naive, then so be it--I'm a fool.

The world itself is filled with so many things that make me lose faith in the decency of others. I spend my entire day watching the news and there's a lot of shit out there that is enough to incite utter chaos and despair in my brain on the subway ride home. So I don't like to feel like the people I come in direct contact with from day to day are indecent or disrespectful as well. I don't want to be someone who isn't a decent friend or a decent human being either.

I suppose this is just a very verbose answer to the question, "Why do you let yourself be treated like crap?" And the short answer could well be, "I'm not good enough for him/her/them/etc." Really, my answer is that, deep down, I'm sickeningly optimistic.

"'You have your wonderful memories,' people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”

I just finished reading Joan Didion's Blue Nights, her "follow up" (if you will) to The Year of Magical Thinking. Friends and readers, you'll remember the first time I read The Year of Magical Thinking: it was the summer of 2010 and I was tiptoeing around the pieces of a broken heart. I felt silly for feeling "better" after reading the book because its subject is so painful. The loss of a husband and daughter almost back-to-back is nothing compared to a heartache; it's a different sort of heartache, really.

When Mengfei lent me The Year of Magical Thinking, she prefaced it with, "This helped me get over the death of my guinea pig." I laughed, but after reading it, I got it. Any loss--no matter how big or small--is still life-changing to various degrees. We lose a pet, and our lives are quieter. We lose a person, and our lives feel smaller. We feel smaller.

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

It has been one year since I graduated college and parted ways from some of the most important people in my life. It's been five months since I moved to New York, away from the semblance of stability and community in DC. It feels like a slow growth, but a growth nonetheless, and I'm thankful for the place I'm at now, though there's an absence of "something more."

I hate to be morbid, but as I was reading Blue Nights, the same thought ran continuously through my head: this reads like Didion's farewell to the world. Didion's work has always contained an anxious feeling that death is soon to come, but there was something about Blue Nights that felt so finished, so final. And, in connecting the dots, I have to wonder if this heartbreak has finally come to an end--the heartbreak of living, of loving, of losing.

We can choose unhappiness every step of the way of our lives. We can choose to let the big or the little things break us. In the face of adversity and pain, we can choose to give in. Or, as Didion shows us, we can learn to live, and I do believe that every day is a struggle to learn to live.

But I also believe that nothing is never too impossible to learn to live through. Nothing is too much to ever stop us from truly living. You can go through your whole life putting off the inevitable to avoid pain and loss. Or you can choose to embrace it. I choose to embrace it.

1. The best surprise ever would be,    the invention of a teleportation device so I could go back and forth between NY and California easily. 
2. Grandpa's 90th birthday/family reunion  is my most favorite memory .
3. The hardest, but most worthwhile thing I've ever done was    move across the country and away from my family and friends. 
4. The best part of my day is    ... it's tough to say because every day is fairly different. I really enjoy the lolsy things sent back and forth in my team, and the lengthy email correspondences with far-away friends. Also, I really enjoy this cookie test we've been doing at work, ha. 
5. Something I like that most people don't is    dry cereal. Yep, I said it. 
6. Something I am willing to fight for is    the success and happiness of the people I love. 
7. Something you might not know about me is    I really don't like accordions. 

(via Lauren @ the little things we do)

The three of us at my commencement.

For Mother's Day when we were little, Na and I used to get up early and "make" breakfast. I write it in quotes because it consisted of Dad opening the fridge and staring blankly into it, and then the three of us pulling whatever it was we found that was acceptable for a fancy breakfast: waffles (of the pop-em-in-a-toaster variety), whip cream and fruit, eggs, Pillsbury biscuits. Dad would make the coffee, and then we'd run up and wake Mom up right as the food was ready. Part of me thinks/knows that Mom used to pretend to sleep in so we could do this because she always was an early riser.

1. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is,    turn off my alarm and check the time to see how much longer I can sleep in.  
2. I can hardly wait for    the weather to be warmer (but not too warm).  
3. The quickest way to my heart is   coffee   because   coffee is the perfect thing to share in all settings! What better way to get to know someone than over a cup of coffee?  
4. A little known fact about me is that   I have social anxiety, which makes NYC very overwhelming.  
5. The best part about my job is   getting to make snarky comments on Twitter all day about politics.  
6. Something I just couldn't live without is   my voice. Interpret at will.  
7. Something useful that I wish I knew how to do is   sew. It would come in handy with minor alterations, and it would be cool to be the kind of person who could make her own clothes and not have it look like a "stitch by numbers" project.  

(via Lauren @ the little things we do.)