Anna

“Hope is a function of struggle—we develop hope not during the easy or comfortable times, but through adversity and discomfort. Hope is forged when our goals, pathways, and agency are tested and when change is actually possible.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“When we’re convinced we have to earn joy, we don’t notice the ten thousand places in which it is already waiting, asking, waving for our attention.”
― Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide

“I do believe that there are frozen places in ourselves - undigested pockets of pain - that need to be recognized and welcomed, so that we can contact that which has never been hurt or wounded or hungry.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“Sam, in what way are you like me as a parent that you are glad about?” “Oh, that’s hugely easy. I’m glad I’m hardworking like you, and that I naturally love to play with my kid, and that I’m sort of flexible for such a rigid, uptight guy. I’ll eventually go with whatever might just work. “What Jax will thank you for giving me is my ability to forgive and start over. Not everyone has it, and I can’t believe I do. I’m glad for two reasons. One, that I can do it, even though it’s hard, because you’re doomed if you can’t, and two, when you can do it, you start finding people in the world like you, who can start over, too, and these are the people you want to be with. People who can forgive. “It’s so incredibly humbling when someone forgives you—I can’t ever believe when people forgive me, because you know how badly you’ve screwed up, and how you’ve hurt them, and how hard it is for them to be brave enough to find it in themselves to reexperience the pain you caused, and the humiliation that is in them because of you—and for someone to be willing to refeel that much like shit again, reexperience it out of not wanting to lose you, means how deeply precious you are to them. And that’s pure gold.”
― Anne Lamott, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son