Open Book

by Jessica Simpson

There are so many firsts to raising kids, and parents are told to catch them all. But they don’t warn you about the lasts.

“Hello, self! What are we gonna confront tonight?”

I didn’t think I was enough, so I overcompensated by making my life a series of experiences for everyone else.

life is really just about one moment at a time. To not think about two years from now, but to think about me right now. Two years from now will figure itself out.

a lot of people who use alcohol as a temporary coping mechanism generally aren’t aware of what they’re covering up, so the abuse becomes permanent. Knowing what I had to face was a good sign for me.

To walk forward through my anxiety, I first had to look back to understand what pain I was running from, and what I was trying to hide.

If I was touched sexually by a girl, and didn’t stop her, did that experience make me gay for life? Did it define me, even if I didn’t want it to happen? I honestly didn’t know if that was how it worked.

It is so easy to notice things about people and tell them. I don’t know why people don’t just give out compliments every single day.

Innocent pranks helped us feel less alone in a world that called us uncool.

I know there are families who have had tragedies. But we were always somehow spared.

We are on this earth such a short time, cruelly short in Sarah’s case. What message did I want to leave behind?

You are perfect as you are. But at the time, this is what we thought we had to do.

The thing about falling in love with someone in a boyband is that you’re not alone.

We were in a place where we loved each other fine, but we just didn’t like each other.

It’s funny, I know, because I had placed such an emphasis on sex by not having it before marriage. After I actually had sex, I understood that the emotional part was what mattered.

“Nah, change is easy,” he said. “Staying the same is a lot harder on you.”

“If you break your arm, you don’t sit there yelling at it for being broken. You get it fixed.”

being so far away gave me an opportunity to look inward in stillness.

It’s not godly to stay together and be completely unhappy.”

How do you react when you find out you have apparently hurt someone so deeply that they feel entitled to such actions?

It felt safe to be so desired.

“Love and obsession are so different. One is healthy, one is not.”

You can have people encourage you and talk to you all day long about your potential, but if you’re not there, ready and willing to be that for yourself, you’ll never be fulfilled.

The truest voice is always that one inside you.

If he didn’t trust me, why was he with me in the first place?

Nobody’s words—compliments or critiques—should define the value of our souls.

Give a girl an insult, she’ll feel bad for a day, but teach her to hate her body, she’ll feel bad forever.

I think we move through the world assuming people know what they mean to us. But so often those assumptions fall short.

“Sometimes we are all so afraid to be honest with ourselves because we know that honesty will lead to somewhere.” I wrote this ten years ago. “Can fear walk us to something better?”

We need to own our weakness, our hurt, our pain, and say it out loud so that we can name what is coming up and why.