I love this:

How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

I love the idea of fitting everything I own, everyone I know, and everything I AM into a backpack and trying to walk. It’s impossible, and yet here I sit (here WE sit), trying to always make it happen. Mostly because I want to make it happen, I want to be the exception to that paragraph, but really…that’s what we’re all conditioned to do. Make room, even when we don’t have space to spare, for everything and everyone and every single little emotion we have.

But we are not swans, and that is so incredibly beautiful to me because we are so obviously sharks, and trying not to be. Well, some of us anyway.

That will be my new tattoo. Eventually.
We are not swans.