At some point you start to think you're the problem. The only consistent variable is the one doing the choosing.

I’ve let something go, and am happier for it. I’ve become a red balloon rising, escaping — not fleeing, ascending — and I win. I don’t take this sordid prize. I win by being honest and possessing integrity, by moving on with my name still intact.

This goldfish is one of those things that will never tarnish in my mind. He remains fixed there — luminous, and unreachable, and so beautiful. Many things are this way in my life.

This is what makes it so bewildering to encounter in people who present as feeling, thinking, and/or complex. The capacity exists. The choice not to use it was made anyway. That gap between what someone is capable of and what they choose is where character actually lives. Or doesn’t.

When a crisis becomes undeniable — when you can see it, every day, in real time, on the screen in your hand — it stops being a political opinion and becomes a personal reckoning. You have to decide what you stand for. Not in theory or merely in your affiliations. But in your actions.

Turn your gaze toward your own portion of the matter. Ask whether the discharge of frustrated violence—turned inward or loosed upon another—has ever proven worth the cost of its eruption.