They arrive through experience, through the specific accumulation of situations in which the alternative to clarity was catastrophe.
I have been using all of them in the last six months.
I married Thomas Brooks in the June that I was thirty-three.
I was, at thirty-three, a person who had spent a decade investing in a career and who was ready, she believed, to invest in something else.
Thomas was charming.
I want to be precise about charming because it is a word that gets used loosely.
Thomas was not simply pleasant.
He had the specific quality of someone who understood, instinctively, what a person needed to hear and who delivered it with a sincerity so complete that you could not find the seam between the performance and the genuine.
He told me I was the most competent person he had ever met.
He told me I worked too hard and deserved to be taken care of.
