excerpts from the book i'll never write

by Nadia Nell Starbinski

I’ve spent all hours of the night contemplating the words to say to you, but no combination of twenty-six different letters could ever accurately capture even a sliver of what this feeling is.

I was tired of my heart being dragged along with broken promises and temporary “I love yous”. I was tired of trying to break my wall down, just to build it up again. It became a heartbreaking cycle I didn’t want to be on anymore. So I stopped looking.

I am sad. Not in this beautiful way that everyone romanticized. I am anxious. Not in this aesthetic where claiming to have mental illness is worth bragging about. I am lost. In every definition of the word. I am suffocating, yet I am the one holding the bag over my head.

and insanity, by definition, is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results each time

Some nights I think about dying and some nights I think about living till I break.

And I didn’t know that you could cry so hard that your heart stops bleeding and still wake up the next morning until I met you.

Sometimes there are people who come into your life and leave a permanent mark. They paint your soul different colors and change the way you see the world. When they leave, you realize that somewhere along the way you lost yourself. You don’t even know who you are anymore because they made you into something completely different. I don’t miss you. I miss myself.

I think there are people that you are supposed to let into your life, and I think that by design they are meant to leave and you are never supposed to speak again.

If you have the faith to pursue your happiness And accept the truth hidden in the lies, If you can hear the deafening silence, Sit in a room full of shadows

There’s a certain thrill to it, the danger of falling in love with the idea of somebody rather than who they actually are.

Stop planning out your funeral and stop writing your suicide note. Save your energy for the love letters you will have to write one day.

All you need to hear is that it is okay to be sad for no reason, a billion reasons, or for one small reason.