Alexandra

“You don't have to believe in yourself. You don't have to think positively. You don't have to wait until you're not longer afraid or in pain to make a move - and you don't have to shut down the pain and the fear in order to make a move, either. These common tropes aren't part of my story, and they don't have to be part of yours. You can absolutely not believe in yourself, be afraid, be in pain, hate it all, and still take the next step anyhow. You can hear all those screams of "No!" and still follow the tender whisper of "Yes.”
― Ralph De La Rosa, Don't Tell Me to Relax: Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage, Feels, and Freak-Outs

“Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss. Katherine’s experience and her insight sit with me. She went through something she thought she could never survive and yet here she is, surviving. “You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“So much of what the self-love movement gets wrong is the result of viewing the self as some
kind of monolithic and singular entity. That’s how we’ve been taught to experience ourselves.
But when we put ourselves under the microscope, when we take a good look inside, that view
starts to unravel. We begin to experience our inner lives as fluid, dynamic, multifaceted, vast,
and surprising.”
― Ralph De La Rosa, Don't Tell Me to Relax: Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage, Feels, and Freak-Outs

“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost