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#1

“Being a compulsive overeater is no different from being an alcoholic or drug addict. The only difference is that you can avoid drugs and alcohol completely and you have to have a relationship with food every day for the rest of your life. It's actually the hardest addiction to live with. If you were an alcoholic and someone said to you that you were required to have a single drink three to five times a day, but were not supposed to ever drink to excess, or a drug addict who was required to take just one pill severeal times a day every day, but you're not supposed to ever take more than that...no one would ever make it through rehab.”
― Stacey Ballis, Good Enough to Eat

tags: inspirational-success-failure

20 likes

#2

“I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men, who look like my father pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

tags: immigration, refugees

117 likes

#3

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

tags: danger, home, immigration, poem, poetry, refugees

275 likes

#4

“The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.”
― Jane Addams

tags: immigration, political-philosophy, social-justice

40 likes

#5

“Here’s to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land. Here’s to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers. Here’s to the janitors who don’t understand English yet work hard despite it all. Here’s to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile. Here’s to the laundry man at the Marriott who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru. Here’s to the bus driver, the Turkish Sufi who almost danced when I quoted Rumi. Here’s to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation. Here’s to the taxi drivers from Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and India who gossip amongst themselves. Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels. Here’s to international money transfer. For never forgetting home. Here’s to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on.”
― Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

tags: diaspora, first-generation, immigration

91 likes

#6

“People who are driven by their values will overcome hurdles, difficulties, and obstacles in ways that people driven only by profit will never be able to”
― Simon S. Tam

tags: character, empowerment, immigration, innovation, inspiration, integrity, love, passion, social-change, social-justice, social-justice-power, success

2 likes

#7

“Now, where are [Mexican illegal immigrants] fleeing from? Mostly from Central America, where they’re fleeing from the results of our policies.”
― Noam Chomsky

tags: conservative, democrat, eye-opening, greed, immigration, imperialism, liberal, poverty, power, republican, sad-truth, war

9 likes

#8

“For millenia migrating birds have filled the skies, heading south in search of
warmer climes and richer pickings. Conversely, these days, droves of our fellow beings struggle northbound against all odds, seeking safety and a better life. The key difference ? This vast exodus of human traffic moves in one direction only. A testimony to failed foreign policy and disastrous military intervention that may have sown the seeds of European disintegration.”
― Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe

11 likes

#9

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

tags: bootstraps, equality, fair, reasonable, work-ethic

267 likes

#11

“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
― Jeanette Winterson

tags: mental-illness, society, world

461 likes

#12

“When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

tags: depressed, depression, fear, mental-health, mental-health-stigma, mental-illness, recovery, recovery-quotes, shame, stigma, stigmatized, survivors

615 likes

#13

“And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane:…Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable…Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment…Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It’s a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not—and not some other way.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

tags: breakdown, depair, depression, mental-illness, rock-bottom

224 likes

#14

“But pain's like water. It finds a way to push through any seal. There's no way to stop it. Sometimes you have to let yourself sink inside of it before you can learn how to swim to the surface.”
― Katie Kacvinsky

tags: emotional-health, emotional-pain, emotional-wounds, emotions, healing, healing-the-past, mental-illness, pain, suffering

247 likes

#15

“You know what truly aches? Having so much inside you and not having the slightest clue of how to pour it out.”
― Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading

tags: aches, bottled-up, clueless, emotional, emotional-pain, heartache, inside, love, sincerity

113 likes

#16

“Like a lot of people with mental illness, I spend a lot of time fronting. It’s really important to me to not appear crazy, to fit in, to seem normal, to do the things “normal people” do, to blend in.
As a defense mechanism, fronting makes a lot of sense, and you hone that mechanism after years of being crazy. Fronting is what allows you to hold down a job and maintain relationships with people, it’s the thing that sometimes keeps you from falling apart. It’s the thing that allows you to have a burst of tears in the shower or behind the front seat of your car and then coolly collect yourself and stroll into a social engagement…

We are rewarded for hiding ourselves. We become the poster children for “productive” mentally ill people, because we are so organized and together. The fact that we can function, at great cost to ourselves, is used to beat up the people who cannot function.

Because unlike the people who cannot front, or who fronted too hard and fell off the cliff, we are able to “keep it together,” whatever it takes.”
― S.E. Smith

tags: crazy, defense-mechanism, emotional-pain, faking-normal, faking-well, fitting-in, hiding-feelings, keeping-it-together, mental-illness, mental-illness-stigma, pretending-to-be-ok, psychological-defense, putting-on-a-brave-face, stigma

43 likes

#17

“We've all felt a little incompetent, insufficient, overexposed, helpless, unlovable, terrified, defective, unfit and unsung at times. And deep down, for whatever reason, you might even think you deserve to. Because why else would you be feeling that way. Like the world is laughing at you.

I promise you it's not.”
― Anne Clendening, Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

tags: dark-times, emotional-pain, emotions, fear, helplessness, insecurity, self-esteem

8 likes

#18

“Unspeakable feelings need to find expression in words. However... verbalization of very intense feelings may be a difficult task.”
― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders

tags: cutting, emotional-pain, emotional-regulation, healing-from-abuse, healing-trauma, overwhelmed, self-destructive-behavior, self-destructiveness, self-harm, self-injury, trauma, trauma-survivors, traumatized, unbearable, unspeakable, verbalization

24 likes

#19

“It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

tags: coping, life

417 likes

#20

“I guess in the end, it doesn’t matter what we wanted. What matters is what we chose to do with the things we had.”
― Mira Grant, Deadline

tags: choice, coping, making-lemonade

101 likes

#21

“And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

tags: ambivalence, confusion, grief, happiness

1080 likes

#22

“Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast,
And each will wrestle for the mastery there.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

tags: inner-conflict

107 likes

#23

“Self-destructiveness may be a primary form of communication for those who do not yet have ways to tame their excruciating inner conflicts and feelings and who cannot yet turn to others for support.”
― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders

tags: borderline-personality, borderline-personality-disorder, communication-problems, cutting, emotional-pain, emotional-wounds, excruciating, inner-conflict, inner-pain, self-destructiveness, self-harm, self-injury, trauma-survivors

34 likes

#24

“Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes'.”
― Stephen Colbert

tags: cynicism, optimism, wisdom, youth

1027 likes

#25

“Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.”
― Peter Senge

tags: cynicism, idealism

159 likes

#26

“See, if you analyze stuff long enough, you’ll eventually break ideas down to the quantum level where nothing makes sense and there’s no longer any meaning to anything. And then when you try to put it all back together again, you realize the pieces just don’t fit anymore. Worse, you realize that the pieces never fit in the first place. And then you’re left with a heap of broken ideas and beliefs that are shattered beyond repair. That’s reality, and that’s what I write about.”
― P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe

tags: analysis, fragmented, life, shattered

23 likes

#27

“For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not - Heaven help us _ all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone...Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another. But it is not altogether plain sailing either...these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled up on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own...so that one will only come if it is raining....another if you can promise it a glass of wine - and so on...”
― Virginia Woolf

tags: fragmented, identity, multiplicity, performative, post-structural, self-awareness, shifting

3 likes

#28

“State integration involves linkage in at least three different dimensions of our lives. The first level of integration is between our different states—the “inter” dimension. We must accept our multiplicity, the fact that we can show up quite differently in our athletic, intellectual, sexual, spiritual—or many other—states. A heterogeneous collection of states is completely normal in us humans. The key to well-being is collaboration across states, not some rigidly homogeneous unity. The notion that we can have a single, totally consistent way of being is both idealistic and unhealthy.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

tags: healthy-multiplicity, integration, multiple-personalities, multiplicity, personality, personality-states

3 likes

#29

“This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.”
― Toni Morrison

50 likes

#30

“The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

tags: ambiguity, art, complexity, writing

55 likes

#31

“She did not know yet how sometimes people keep parts of themselves hidden and secret, sometimes wicked and unkind parts, but often brave or wild or colorful parts, cunning or powerful or even marvelous, beautiful parts, just locked up away at the bottom of their hearts. They do this because they are afraid of the world and of being stared at, or relied upon to do feats of bravery or boldness. And all of those brave and wild and cunning and marvelous and beautiful parts they hid away and left in the dark to grow strange mushrooms—and yes, sometimes those wicked and unkind parts, too—end up in their shadow.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

tags: complexity, layers, masks

203 likes

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