Emily Johanson

“The people you surround yourself with make up the quality of your life. These are people who influence you, whether consciously or subconsciously. They serve as a reflection of your values, your hopes, what you think of yourself. These are the people you are sharing your precious, finite, never-guaranteed-but-always-tick-tock-slipping-away time on Earth with, so my advice is to be fucking greedy and ruthless. Choose ONLY the people who lift you up, who are reaching for higher things themselves, who MAKE YOU FEEL AWESOME. Grab on to them, hold them, scream ‘Mine, mine, mine’ and do everything in your power to be good to them”
― Tara Schuster, Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who's Been There

“We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive.

[...] Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.”-Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, p.79, Lori Gottlieb

“It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears.

What are we afraid of?

We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy. We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives.

Sometimes it takes a while to admit our fears, especially to ourselves.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children’s childhoods--the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that’s now in the parents’ pasts. They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn’t have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“[...] Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced [...}

It’s only lately that I’ve realized that Winnicott is not suggesting that breakdowns do not recut. Now I see that he may be suggesting just the opposite: that a fear of breakdown in our past may be precisely what causes it to repeat in our future”
― Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts