No One Can Take What I’ve Lived From Me

I want to tell you something that took me a long time to understand, and that I now hold onto more tightly than almost anything else.

Everything you’ve lived — good and bad, beautiful and damaging, the things that made you and the things that nearly broke you — is yours. Permanently. Sealed. No one can reach back into your past and remove it. No one can take from you what you’ve already received, or erase what you’ve already learned, or undo what you’ve already survived. The past is the one thing in existence that is completely, absolutely, irrevocably yours.

This sounds obvious when I say it plainly. It didn’t feel obvious to me for a long time, and I suspect it doesn’t feel obvious to a lot of people who are living inside difficult circumstances, because when you’re inside something hard, the weight of what’s happening now tends to eclipse what’s already been. But here’s what I’ve come to know: the past doesn’t get lighter just because the present is heavy. And it doesn’t get taken away, either. It accumulates. All of it — the damage and the beauty, the losses and the gifts — accumulates into something that is, eventually, the whole of you.

I want to tell you about some of what’s accumulated in mine, because I think the accounting matters, and because I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog describing the weight and not enough time describing what the weight was in service of.

Eva arrived when I was thirteen.

A German Shepherd puppy, brought home by my father for reasons that had nothing to do with generosity — she was a gift from someone important, a status object, an acquisition. She became the most important being in my life for fourteen years.

She saved me. I want to say that without qualification and without sentimentality, because I think it’s literally true: she saved me. Not dramatically, not in a single moment — she saved me the way consistent, unperformed warmth saves a person who has had very little of it, the way a presence that is exactly what it appears to be saves a person who has been surrounded by presences that weren’t. She was pure in the precise sense — her exterior and her interior were the same thing, completely, with nothing managed or concealed or performed. She was warm because she was warm, full stop, with no agenda attached and nothing it was in service of.

She died when I was twenty-seven. I’ve carried her since, and I will carry her until I go wherever I’m going. No one can take her from me. She arrived, she was what she was, she gave what she gave, and that is sealed. It happened. It’s mine.

I’ve been living with rescued fighting bulls.

This is not a sentence most people can say, and I say it without pride exactly — more with the specific gratitude of someone who knows how unlikely it is, and how much it cost to get there, and how completely worth it the unlikely expensive thing turned out to be.

Fighting bulls are not gentle animals. They are not misunderstood house pets. They are large, powerful, alert, and constitutionally uninterested in being told what to do. What they are, also, is honest — in the same way Eva was honest, in the way all animals are honest, without the gap between what’s shown and what’s real that human relationships so often contain. When a fighting bull decides you’re safe, it decides completely. The trust, once given, is total. And it’s given without negotiation, without calculation, without the slow erosion of conditions that human trust so often involves.

I am loved by fighting bulls. In their awkward, massive, entirely un-sentimental way — a head leaned against me, an eye that changes quality when I approach, a body that visibly relaxes at the sound of my voice — they love me, and I love them, and no one can take that from me either. Not the ones I still have, and not the ones I’ve lost. They happened. They’re mine.

My mother is still alive.

I want to say this while it’s still true and while I can say it with gratitude rather than retrospect: my mother, who survived a marriage to the most dangerous man I’ve ever known, who maintained her genuine faith and her genuine goodness through conditions that should have destroyed both, who called me her impossible child and meant it with love, who told me she couldn’t keep her figure after me because I was too much from the beginning — my mother is still alive, and the example she has set across an entire life is something I carry every day.

She has been, throughout everything, the living proof that genuine goodness exists and is sustainable, that it doesn’t require the absence of difficulty, that a person can be good in the real sense — not performed, not strategic, not in service of anything — under conditions that make goodness genuinely costly. I have not always been able to replicate what she demonstrated. But I have never been able to forget it, either, and the not-forgetting has mattered more than I can easily account for.

No one can take her example from me.

Nani chose a life with me.

I want to be precise about that verb, because I think it matters: she chose it. Not naively — she knew what she was choosing, and she chose it anyway, with the specific warmth of someone whose formation produced genuine warmth rather than the kind that needs protecting. She is, in some ways, everything I’m not — warmer, lighter, more naturally connected to the pleasure of ordinary things. And in some ways everything I needed, for exactly that reason.

Whatever happens, whenever it happens, the beauty she has brought into my life is already mine. The warmth is already received. The choosing is already done. These are sealed facts now, belonging to me permanently, traveling with me wherever I go.

I fell in love with Rio de Janeiro.

I also stepped onto French soil for the first time and understood, immediately, that I had already been there — in some previous form, in some previous century, in some version of myself that predates this one. I walked Lisbon for a year and loved it with the specific love you have for something that is yours at a cellular level.

These are not small things. I know they can sound small — a city, a feeling, a year of coffee in beautiful rooms — against the weight of what else has been in this life. But I’ve been doing the math for forty-five years, and here is what the math says: the weight of the beautiful things, as rare as they have been, as outnumbered as they have been by the difficult ones, has outweighed the bad. The beautiful things carry more, somehow. They last differently. A year in Lisbon is still here, twelve years later, still warm, still specific, still mine — while many of the difficult things have become, over time, simply background, simply formation, simply the conditions under which everything else happened.

I want to say something to you directly, because this piece isn’t only about my accounting. It’s about yours.

Everything you’ve lived — whatever that is, wherever you’re reading this from, however different your specific inventory is from mine — is yours. The good and the bad equally, completely, permanently.

The bad things: extract what they have to teach, and they have more to teach than you expect. The most useful education I ever received came from the most difficult sources. How to read a room. How to stand in an alarm without the alarm running everything. How to move toward something that requires everything you have when everything you have doesn’t feel like enough. How to hold a wall with an exhausted finger and let through only what gets through. How to keep going when continuing is the only thing that was ever available. I learned all of this from things I wouldn’t have chosen, from conditions I didn’t ask for, from a formation that cost more than any formation should cost a child.

And the beautiful things: hold them. Not as consolation for the bad ones — that framing diminishes both. Hold them because they’re real, because they happened, because they belong to you in the only way anything ever truly belongs to anyone. The person who loved you. The animal that trusted you. The city that recognized you. The moment that was exactly what it should have been. These are sealed. They cannot be revised, removed, or diminished by anything that comes after. They are already fully in your possession, and they will remain there, for as long as you carry them, which is as long as you exist.

This is what I’ve come to believe, after forty-five years that felt like a thousand: the accumulation of what’s been lived is the only capital that can’t be lost. The money goes. The health changes. The places become unreachable. The people leave or are left. But what was actually experienced — received into the body, into the memory, into whatever it is that makes a person who they are — that stays.

No one can take it from you.

Not from you. Not from me.

Not ever.

This is what everything on this blog is built on — and what the full account, beginning with the year Lisbon and I were together, is about.