Julie Harding

“It all slowly drifted into focus: Am I an addict? I don’t do drugs, I don’t really drink, I’m not hooked on sex like some ghetto hyena. But I did not know how to stop, or be still, or be quiet, or alone. I’m addicted to the approval of others, and to secure their approval, I became addicted to winning. And to guarantee and sustain my stream of massive victories, I became addicted to working, to grinding, and obsessively pursuing perfection. But there was a deeper issue at play. I saw downtime as the enemy, a place where you lose things.”
― Will Smith, Will

“It won't be until much later, years from now, that I'll seek out other former homeschoolers, and realize how common, how deep this fear can run: to confront your homeschool teacher or to hurt them in ways they might never forgive is to risk losing not only a parents but also your entire childhood social sphere, the worldview in which you were raised. It is potentiallly an act of self-exile from a home country to which you can never again return, and maybe this fear is one reason why there still aren't proper regulations on homeschooling, why homeschool kids can still so easily vanish from the world. With the odds stacked so heavily against speaking out - and homeschooling still a relatively new phenomenon - so many of the necessary stories have not yet been told.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir

“The ebb and flow of the tide is the heartbeat of the planet. When they sit in the ocean all day, they are tuning themselves in to the frequency of the earth.”
― Will Smith, Will

“We had concluded that no one can make a person happy. You can make a person smile; you can compose a moment that helps a person to feel good; you can deliver a joke that makes a person laugh; you can create an environment where a person feels safe. We can and must be helpful and kind and loving, but whether a person is happy or not is utterly out of your control. Every person must wage a solitary internal war for their own contentment.”
― Will Smith, Will