We don’t seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.
I felt like all of the work was training for just one central idea: Accept your child for who he is. I’m not saying that I’ve done a brilliant job with that. But I’ve done my best.
If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children – more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter – I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.
I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.
The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.
Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.
I believe very deeply that this beauty I call the soul is not a random occurrence. I don’t know what its meaning is at some larger level, but I know that it has meaning.
Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds.
I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.
The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.
Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.
I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.
I’m sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love.
Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.
It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.
We live in the right time, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.
I grew up in a very rationalist household. My father, in particular, came from that mid-century tradition of thinking science will ultimately explain everything.
I’m not studying everything that can go wrong. What I’m studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.
Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it.