I made very good money and spent all of it every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck...
As charming as the room was, I knew it wouldn’t work for me. I do not need charming. I need to be online, at all times. I need surge protection.
Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.
My goal was to get through the day as fast as possible. I worked fast because I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done because I wanted to go home to my nest and drink.
You know, sometimes just giving yourself permission to feel any emotion without judgment or censorship can lessen the intensity of those negative emotions.
This is the right house and the right life, but it’s weird because I’ve never had a home before; I’ve had addresses.
We did not pass one other Mercury Merkur XR4Ti the entire way.
I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone.
And we were married and all the windows were open but the smell of flowers was so thick and sickly sweet. I felt like I might choke to death.
In preschool, when somebody hurts us, the teacher sees to it that the person who hurt us apologizes. It is ingrained in us from a very early age that inflicted pain or wrongdoing or unfairness should and will be corrected. Note the passive phrasing: “be corrected.” We will not, as children, take control and make sure these amends are delivered in a timely fashion.
Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to “getting over” one’s past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling.
What little factual information I absorbed in my life was gleaned from lectures the Professor gave to Gilligan. For.
Optimism sprouts from the knowledge that you are in control of your own life, not your past and not those around you. Part of being in control is taking responsibility for how you feel. This means not just admitting to uncomfortable feelings but then examining your circumstances to see what can be done to change these feelings at the source. Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.
The unfairness of your current status is unimportant. What matters is, can you do what you need to do? If.
Dutch isn’t easy for the outsider to learn, because it’s spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex.
I sat up and my mouth tasted horrible, like stale pot, beer and Cheetos. The exact combination of ingredients that had caused me to pass into unconsciousness on Natalie’s floor.
I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was. Only the is.
Shame is also a covert and effective bullying method. All those bullies from the seventh grade didn’t simply evaporate. They grew up, too, and it’s pretty safe to assume that the majority did not seek therapy on their eighteenth birthday to explore their disturbing childhood need for cruelty.
The shame is disguised here as helpful. But both people in this conversation would know it was bullying.
When you feel spontaneously excited by something – a new career you never thought about, a haircut you see in a magazine and want – shame is the voice that brings you “back down to earth.