Trâm

“When you leave a conversation, ask yourself, What did I just learn about that person? What was most concerning to that person today? How did that person feel about what we were talking about?”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an act of surrender.”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

“How long would you want to stay with someone who insisted on treating you as if you were the same person you were the day you two met? This is true not just in romantic relationships but in all relationships. Even toddlers object to being treated like the infants they were just months earlier. Offer a two-year-old a helping hand with something they’ve already learned how to do and you’ll likely get an exasperated, “I do it!” Listening is how we stay connected to one another as the pages turn in our lives.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“However, it was there that I began to realize that my initial intuitions about alcohol and other drugs were precisely upside down. Rather than provide a solution to my problems with living, they had chipped away at every prospect until only the barest shred of life remained. I’d sought wellness and became sick; fun, but lived in a constant state of anxious dread; freedom, and was enslaved. In just ten years, my sources for solace had totally betrayed me, carving out a canyon deep and unlivable. Drugs were destroying every aspect of my life, yet my days revolved around self-administering until I passed out.”
― Judith Grisel, Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction