Jan Smith

“suffering from an avalanche of depression; we’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, and yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high, and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective. Sometimes, the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one: we need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on in there; that sometimes, everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it, and to be kind. To find our own grit, in our own time.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we only have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that, because it’s happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will one day be past history. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. But one thing is certain: we will simply have different things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again. In the meantime, we can only deal with what’s in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“Maude’s bedroom was a veritable time capsule, a personally collated museum containing all her treasures. Whenever friends had entered the room, it hit them in the eye, like a migraine; swirling colours and an attack on the senses. Along with the aroma of patchouli, Maude’s favourite, there was an unmistakable aura of times gone by, dimensions overlapping and coming together.”
― Patricia Dixon, Resistance