Mikayla Rose

“We are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration - we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“Doesn't it overwhelm you sometimes -- To be alive? Don't you sometimes feel like at any moment you could be torn away from yourself? From your life?”
― Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

“I think,” Juna says after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterwards. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” She looks sideways at me and sniffs. “My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know.” She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. “It’s hard when you look up and realise that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.”
― Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe