When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Sometimes isolation can be shared.
All life includes loss. It's taken me many, many years to learn to deal with that, and I don't expect I'll ever be fully resigned to it. But that doesn't mean we have to turn away from the world, or stop striving for the best that we can do and be. We owe that much to ourselves, at least, and we deserve whatever measure of good may come of it.
He went out with a variety of women, slept with some of them, hated the whole meaningless process. Drinks, dinners, plays and concerts and gallery openings. . . He grew to despise the rigid formality of dating, missed the easy familiarity of simply being with someone, sharing friendly silences and unforced laughter.
I'm working my way steadily back and I'm feeling good.
Sometimes, with leaders, the stakes are very high indeed. Churchill, in WWII, for example, could not afford to utter publicly his concerns about England's ability to survive Hitler's onslaught. He thought about them, but the leadership conversation sometimes needs to inspire, not voice doubt.
Unrequited love–plain desperate aboveboard boy-chasing–turned you into a salesperson, and what you were selling was something he didn't want, couldn't use, would never miss. Unrequited love was deciding to be useless, and I could never abide uselessness.
We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought?