The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

Some people didn’t know that life wasn’t supposed to be hard.

“If people want to think that life is hard for them, then they are welcome to that idea, believe me. But you don’t have to see it that way. You can look for good things instead.”

There are signs everywhere you look, she said. Messages coming to you. You just have to watch for them.

grief is something you can get used to. You shrink it down, put it in your pocket, like a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper, and maybe after a while, you just leave it in your drawer and don’t carry it with you at all.

Girls at school being mean? Who cares? The important thing was to love yourself. And to laugh at anything that might take you away from all that love. The other important thing, she said, was to always be yourself, even if that person you were was weird and quirky and didn’t know anything about getting along in life. “You may not know who you are, but remember that nobody else knows who they are either.

Those people who seem like they’ve got it all together? They don’t. You can always love everybody and everything,” she said. “Flow it to anybody you think you might hate.

Life is what you make it. See yourself as a victim, and that’s how it will always be.”

It takes character to live with the imperfect facts of your life and to change the things you can change, and to be willing to live with the things you can’t do anything about.

I’m going to stop being a dumb, idiotic kid who thinks love is like some miracle that’s supposed to come and save me. I am going to be the one who gives love. To everybody.”

sometimes we tell ourselves a little story, and we just hold on to it until it feels like it has to be true, and we can’t switch out of it.”