Alyss

“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

“The power of story is to heal and to sustain. And if we are brave enough to tell our own story, we realize we're not alone, again and again.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointment. This can take the shape of numbing, foreboding joy, being cynical or critical, or just never really fully engaging.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted