Lizz Schumer

We all deserve to smile on Monday mornings.

There’s a Chinese proverb, “Keep always the edge of hunger” that I’ve kept in my locker, my cubicle wall, the edges of notebooks and my mind. I stay hungry for the next story, the next byline, the next book deal, the next perfectly polished stone word.

I choose to live in wholeness, to remember how we were, before we threw rocks at the safe world we’d created.

My path isn’t yours. I can’t tell you what you should have learned in your 20s, because I’m still learning. I can’t tell you what I wished I knew in college, because we didn’t have the same journey, and we won’t. We can’t.

I was the girl who laughed at A Walk to Remember. When Nicole Kidman coughed up blood in Moulin Rouge, I giggled as my friends reached for the tissues. I laughed because I couldn’t cry.

We brag about how little sleep we get. How much coffee we need just to function.

As a society, I think we’re losing the ability to appreciate being alone. With the constant stream of social media feeding into the palms of our hands and soon, directly into our eyes, we don’t ever have to be truly isolated. Unless we want to.