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She didn't understand that this is what happens as you get older- that the same thing that repulsed her when she was young is the exact same thing that draws her near now.

Until it is gone, of course... What do you do? Do you start all over again? Do you fixate on the new thing that you are sure is going to make you happy'? How many times does a person do this over a lifetime? Is that just what life is?

She worries it's her fault and that by giving Lila everything, they have given her nothing. They have stripped her of the most important thing: actual human desire. Her life has no urgency. There are no stakes.

And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body.

I need you to tell me that you love me more often right now, she should have said.

But Phoebe hesitates. The old Phoebe never made the first move. Not even with her husband after years of marriage-she always waited for him to initiate. She was always too embarrassed to admit that she ever wanted anything, as if there was something humiliating about being a person with desires. But what would it feel like to be different? To be totally honest about what she wants?

But this is how it happens, she realizes. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she's spent her entire life just pretending to be great.

There is no so thing as a happy place. Because when you're happy, everywhere is a happy place.

Love is visible-it paints the air between two people a difterent color, and everyone can
see it.

“I think we talk about happiness all wrong. As if it's this fixed state ere ping to reach. Like we'll just be able to live there, forever. But that's not my experience with happiness. For me, it comes and goes. It mows up and then disappears like a bubble."

I agree," she says. "How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?"
"T's truly the most dramatic thing that will ever happen to us, he
says.
"It's basically like being on a sinking ship. Except you're never aloved to acknowledge that the ship is sinking"
"And then people roll their eyes every time you mention that the ship might be sinking," Phoebe says.

In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions andrevisions—-we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there wherher to keep that card and discard the next…. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades
to come.

If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.

The way people interpret a situation says more about them than the situation

Love is like a fine wine, where flavors deepen and change over time.

The idea of body appreciation is great, too, and it's been helpful to me in my own recovery from diet culture. Even if I'm having a day where I'm not jazzed about what my body looks like, I an still appreciate it for everything it does.

Breaking free from diet culture means breaking free from all of it, including idealizing smaller bodies and equating thinness with health and moral virtue. In a truly earing relationship with your body, weight loss or management can never be the goal.

Moreover, we can't learn to use things other than tood to cope with our feelings it those feelings re largely driven by needng food. Granted, once we release the restrictive thoughts and behaviors, we may also see that we need lo develop some additional coping skills. But we can't know that for sure until we've recovered from the trauma of deprivation, wich makes anyone reach for food to cope.

The second key to getting back to the default mode of intuitive eating is to help your body trust that you won't be depriving it anymore. Having enough food —and not "just enough, bul really an abundance, as much as you want—is essential for recovery from diet culture.

Deprivation is the very real sense that food won’t be available again when we want- that we don't have enough. Deprivation makes hunger, pleasure, and fullness stop feeling sate and easy. Deprivation makes our relationships with food become complicated and tortured.

All the autonomy and agency we were born with when it umes to food — knowing when we were hungry and telling the word about it, eating what looked good and being excited to try new things, losing interest in food when we'd had enough, moving our bodies whenever we felt like it and resting when we needed to got taken away as we were indoctrinated into diet cuture.

Diet ulture can make people so fearful of food and anxious shout losing control that they can't truly participate in their lives It isolates them, even when they're desperate for connec ton. In this way the Life Thief steals people's capacity for every-darjoy. It keeps them from being present in all the big and small moments of their lives

Remember that diet culture is a system of beliefs that equates thinness with health and moral virtue, so the aspiration to be thin isn't just skin-deep. At its most fundamental level, it's about the desire to be seen as good, lovable, and enough. It's about the desire to be special, and the desire to belong.

To your body, diets (or "lifestyle changes," or "eating plans," or whatever they call themselves now feel like famine.
Even the most seemingly gentle diet pulls the pendulum to the side of restriction. When that happens, your body's natural response is to push the pendulum back to the other side-to eating a lot,

"Even though I'm in a much larger body now —you know, very fat—I like my body so much better and I'm so much more connected to and appreciative of my body than I was when I was growing up," she says. "Weight loss doesn't heal people from their internalized weight stigma.
Bad body image is not cured by weight loss."

like trying on a million outfits in the morning and making yourself late for work because you "feel fat" in everything you own. Aside from the fact that fat is not a feeling,

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

There is no such thing as truth. There are truths, plural, each of which is to a large degree subjective. That is how academic discourse collectively arrived at the proposition put forward by Nietzsche a century earlier, that "there are no facts, there are only interpretations."

"No man owns his own life," he said. "Part of you is always in someone else's hands. All ye can do is hope it's mostly God's hands you're in."

What makes the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education, and induction into an identity and a history.