Mandy

“I'd spent the preceding twenty days swirling in a paralyzing vortex of loud sounds and bad smells, overwhelming stimuli, and confusing social norms, and I'd had just about all I could take.”
― Tracey Garvis Graves, The Girl He Used to Know

“Don't compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don't drown in a sea of 'what ifs'. Don't clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes where you made different decisions.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open. Too much clutter on the desktop. There is a metaphorical spinning rainbow wheel inside me. Disabling me. And if only I could find a way to switch off some of the frames, if only I could drag some of the clutter into the trash, then I would be fine. But which frame would I choose, when they all seem so essential? How can I stop my mind being overloaded when the world is overloaded? We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”
― Tara Westover, Educated