Joy

“People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Show me a woman who can hold space for a man in real fear and vulnerability, and I’ll show you a woman who’s learned to embrace her own vulnerability and who doesn’t derive her power or status from that man. Show me a man who can sit with a woman in real fear and vulnerability and just hear her struggle without trying to fix it or give advice, and I’ll show you a man who’s comfortable with his own vulnerability and doesn’t derive his power from being Oz, the all-knowing and all-powerful.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“Uncertainty and failure might look like the end of the road to you. But uncertainty is a part of life. Facing uncertainty and failure doesn’t always make people weaker and weaker until they give up. Sometimes it wakes them up, and it’s like they can see the beauty around them for the first time. Sometimes losing everything makes you realize how little you actually need. Sometimes losing everything sends you out into the world to breathe in the air, to pick some flowery weeds, to take in a new day.

Because this life is full of promise, always. It’s full of beads and dolls and chipped plates; it’s full of twinklings and twinges. It is possible to admit that life is a struggle and also embrace the fact that small things—like sons who call you and beloved dogs in framed pictures and birds that tell you to drink your fucking tea—matter. They matter a lot.

Stop trying to make sense of things. You can’t think your way through this. Open your heart and drink in this glorious day. You are young, and you will find little things that will make you grateful to be alive. Believe in what you love now, with all of your heart, and you will love more and more until everything around you is love. Love yourself now, exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you’ll know exactly how big that is.

Let’s celebrate this moment together. There are twinklings and twinges, right here, in this moment. It is enough. Let’s find the eastern towhee.”
― Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life