blue, green, and white. I felt like a princess in a tower overlooking the most beautiful of kingdoms. I would lay on my back and give all my tears to the earth and let myself be held by her. Being starved for love, I played a game where I visualized love pouring out of every rock, I imagined love streaming into my heart from every leaf of every tree, I imagined the oxygen that left the branch of each tree entering the branches of my lungs, and then my breath leaving my body and entering the trees again. I imagined love from every salt cell in the sea, and from the glaciers with their heavy slow bodies, and from the birds that cried in the distance. And I felt truly loved there. I felt nurtured. Itold nature all my secrets and all my dreams and I let the hard stone support me like a father and the soft soil nurture me like a mother. I wanted to be like that tree. I didn’t want to grow more brittle with time, like my dad seemed to be doing. I wanted to become . . . what was the opposite of brittle? Strong? Not exactly. Big? No, that wasn’t quite it. As I looked at the roots digging deeply, spreading out, forming an interconnected base, I saw the hard wood as dense fiber, woven tightly, and that’s when it struck me: the strongest things bend. The opposite of brittle was bending.
Great survivors have the ability to yield, adapt, give. This stopped me in my tracks. My life was not teaching me to yield, it was teaching me to cover up, protect, harden. I felt a panic. Hardening was the opposite of yielding. I walked home deep in thought and wrote in my book, things that don’t bend break . This lyric has stayed with me my whole life, reincarnated in many songs. It made such an impression on my soul. Once I began to be punished for seemingly being alive, I knew it was no longer safe to be honest about who I was with the people closest to me. I showed the world and my family one face. Outwardly, I made myself as small and dull as possible. But inwardly, I was limitless and expansive, and my words on paper became the rings of my inner tree. The rings of stress and distress were there in black and white, but a feeling of calm came over me when I wrote about what I was learning from studying nature. Slow growth meant thoughtful growth. Thoughtful growth meant conscious choices. It was a ladder of thought that pulled me up over the years until I arrived at one of the mottos I try to live by: hard wood grows slowly.
If I wanted to grow strong and last, and not be brittle or broken easily, I had a duty to make decisions that were not just good in the moment but good for long-term growth. I would not let myself drink or do drugs because that was a quick fix to escape an uncomfortable feeling. The better thing was to get to the root of what I was feeling. It meant solutions had to be the right ones for long-term happiness—there were no shortcuts. Icould not use drugs to numb, I could not use anorexia or bulimia to lose weight, and it also meant not using cynicism to cover my real feelings of anxiety or vulnerability. In a world of cool, casual, hip, and snarky, I knew if I indulged in these feelings, I would sink to the bottom of my life like a stone. I had to respond to my life with vulnerability, sensitivity, and honesty, because they were my only real defenses in this dangerous endeavor called surviving life. I vowed to try to remember to take the time to grow slowly. To take the time to make notes and study. To stay in my body even when I was in pain. I have summoned this motto repeatedly in my life—later, it helped me handle my agoraphobia, crippling fear, and anxiety while I was homeless. It helped me have the courage to lose weight the right way even when the press dubbed me “the fat Renée Zellweger” at age twenty-two, and with countless other decisions that shaped not just the kind of artist but, more important, the kind of human I would become, as well as the kind of longevity I would have. It helped give me
Great survivors have the ability to yield, adapt, give. This stopped me in my tracks. My life was not teaching me to yield, it was teaching me to cover up, protect, harden. I felt a panic. Hardening was the opposite of yielding. I walked home deep in thought and wrote in my book, things that don’t bend break . This lyric has stayed with me my whole life, reincarnated in many songs. It made such an impression on my soul. Once I began to be punished for seemingly being alive, I knew it was no longer safe to be honest about who I was with the people closest to me. I showed the world and my family one face. Outwardly, I made myself as small and dull as possible. But inwardly, I was limitless and expansive, and my words on paper became the rings of my inner tree. The rings of stress and distress were there in black and white, but a feeling of calm came over me when I wrote about what I was learning from studying nature. Slow growth meant thoughtful growth. Thoughtful growth meant conscious choices. It was a ladder of thought that pulled me up over the years until I arrived at one of the mottos I try to live by: hard wood grows slowly.
If I wanted to grow strong and last, and not be brittle or broken easily, I had a duty to make decisions that were not just good in the moment but good for long-term growth. I would not let myself drink or do drugs because that was a quick fix to escape an uncomfortable feeling. The better thing was to get to the root of what I was feeling. It meant solutions had to be the right ones for long-term happiness—there were no shortcuts. Icould not use drugs to numb, I could not use anorexia or bulimia to lose weight, and it also meant not using cynicism to cover my real feelings of anxiety or vulnerability. In a world of cool, casual, hip, and snarky, I knew if I indulged in these feelings, I would sink to the bottom of my life like a stone. I had to respond to my life with vulnerability, sensitivity, and honesty, because they were my only real defenses in this dangerous endeavor called surviving life. I vowed to try to remember to take the time to grow slowly. To take the time to make notes and study. To stay in my body even when I was in pain. I have summoned this motto repeatedly in my life—later, it helped me handle my agoraphobia, crippling fear, and anxiety while I was homeless. It helped me have the courage to lose weight the right way even when the press dubbed me “the fat Renée Zellweger” at age twenty-two, and with countless other decisions that shaped not just the kind of artist but, more important, the kind of human I would become, as well as the kind of longevity I would have. It helped give me
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