Julianna

“You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?"
"There's no self to hate. It's like, when I look into myself, there's no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine. They're not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I do look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It's like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there's a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it's solid all the way through. But with me, I don't think there is one that is solid. They just keep getting smaller.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracise and minimise. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways pain is the opposite of language.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down