I am (still) reading “Everything I Know About Love” by Dolly Alderton...
and I have felt a connection to so many snippets of her memoir. I feel like Dolly took a thought I’ve had or a feeling I’ve felt and put it into words in a way that I never could. Here are a few pieces from her memoir that have tugged at my heart:
“As I got older and mercifully more aware of what a precious gift a healthy working body is, I felt ashamed and bewildered that I could have treated mine so badly. But it would be a lie to say I think I will ever be entirely free of what happened in that time, which is something no one ever tells you. You can restore your physical being to health; you can develop a rational, balanced, caring attitude to weight as well as good daily habits. But you can’t forget how many calories are in a boiled egg or how many steps burn how many calories. You can’t forget what exact weight you were every week of every month that made up that time. You can try as hard as you can to block it out, but sometimes, on very difficult days, it feels like you’ll never be as euphoric as that ten-year-old licking lurid jam off her fingertips, not ever again.”
“When you begin to wonder if life is really just waiting for buses on Tottenham Court Road and ordering books you’ll never read off Amazon; in short, you’re having an existential crisis... You are moving out of the realm of fantasy ‘when I grow up’ and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be.”
“I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside.”
“‘Because I’m the problem. Not the city. Not any of the circumstances are the problem. I’m the thing that needs changing.’”
“‘It may seem that life is difficult at times but it’s really as simple as breathing in and out. Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You are made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.’”
“‘If you feel shit all the time it’s having a very, very big effect on your life.... you’re broken into a hundred different floating pieces. You’re all over the place You’ve got no rooting. You don’t know how to be with yourself.’”
“She was telling me that this was a room where I didn’t have to labor over every word and gesture and anecdote to accommodate her in the hope that she would like me.This woman with no sense of self, no self-regard, no self-esteem -- a shapeshifting, people-pleasing presence; a tangled knot of anxiety--was being given permission to just be.”
