nicole

“All this time, I'd wanted to do a job so well that I'd feel done. I wanted to accomplish enough to be good enough. But if that wasn't possible, then the very condition I'd been working so hard to avoid - being uncertain and unfinished - might be unavoidable. It might just be how life was, and everyone else had known it all along, like they all knew what a lobsterman was, and I'd been working my ass off like a mouse on a wheel, not realizing that I was running toward cheese that wasn't even there.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“I used to think that if only I could make everything perfect, then I could relax and have fun. If I could just eliminate all mistakes, my life would settle into place - click! - and my mind would rest. If I'm being truthful, I have to acknowledge that on some unchangeable, deep-down level, there's still a part of me that thinks that. I'm still a first grader at a spelling bee, thinking that what matters more than anything is that I get every word right.

But by now, I've built up a crowd of selves who can set that little girl at ease. It's okay, they tell her. Mistakes will happen - they have happened - and it's not the end of the world. They get her to loosen up a little bit. They help her see that doing things wrong is part of doing life right. They show her that joy is bigger than fear. It can even be funny when things go haywire.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Maybe the trick isn't sticking everything out. The trick is quitting the right thing at the right time. The trick is understanding that saying "No, thank you" to something you're expected to accept isn't failure. It's a whole other level of success.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“The line between what was real and what was fantasy. That fucking mystery. It made me believe there was something to be solved and I was the only one who could solve it. I let myself think that I was the protagonist in some grand adventure, that I could be in any way special. And for that I forfeited what I did have that was real: I forfeited Veracity.”
― Jane Pek, The Verifiers