Jennifer

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You are not too much. You have never been too much. You will never be too much. The very idea is preposterous. Because you were born to be you. All of you. Not a tiny acceptable sliver. Not a watered down version with colors dulled and edges softened. No. You were meant to be every last pulsing-bleeding-loving-crying-feeling bit.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“You own your body. You own your body. You own your body. Your center and your edges are yours and yours alone. In this world – this world of rape culture of ingrained misogyny and violence done against girls and women – you will encounter and absorb messages your entire life that place you on trial for the crime of existing as female in this world. That will question your right to wear or speak or move through the world in the way that you do. That will seek to harm you in ways large and small. As a woman, you will hold stories that sometimes feel too painful to hold. As your mother, that brings me to my knees. I grant you the strength to know that this too, you will survive. I promise you I will protect you with every ounce of life in my body. And where I cannot protect you from this world, I will love you inside of it – fierce and holy and precious beyond all knowing.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library