Love and Neglect

1. Love admits no explanation, and neither does neglect. There is no answer to why we keep loving someone, just as there is no rational answer to why we keep neglecting someone. We cannot account for either.

2. Both neglecting and being neglected are like addictions. The one who does it keeps doing it; the one who receives it keeps receiving it. Watch closely: the person we most desperately want is, more often than not, the very one who neglects us most deeply. And the person who gives us the most attention—we turn them away first thing in the morning.

3. Most of the world's most successful and celebrated people endure, at some point in their lives, a measure of neglect we cannot even fathom. If we could know it, we might discover that the neglect we suffer is truly nothing—a pittance—beside what they have borne.

4. The person you dream of, the one whose company for even a minute feels like grace—be certain: someone neglects even them. The one who neglects will himself be neglected; and if he does not neglect, he will still be neglected. Living, we are all destined to know neglect. Our fate is written not in the neglect itself, but in what we learn from it, in how much we can bear.

5. Some people lose themselves in the weight of repeated neglect. Others find that the first step on their path to success is precisely the neglect they received from someone. Neglect can unmake a person, or it can be the very thing that saves them from being unmade.

6. If you triumph once against the neglect of someone dear to you, then—in the realm of feeling—no one in this life will ever truly be able to hurt you again. The person who has learned to endure neglect, to digest it, cannot be harmed. There is simply no way in.