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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sometimes no one wants you to fly, not even the people you love most. But you gotta fly.
You don’t have to “get over” your feelings. Why shouldn’t they take as long as they take?
LIFE GOALS: Practice staying in uncomfortable conversations with people I love—even though I want to run away.
Feelings are signals sent from your body’s nervous system about your physical + emotional state: to tell you how you’re doing + what you need. You’re meant to notice them.
Needing others is so BASIC to our human biology that teaching people not to need others is teaching trauma. And the major tool for that is shame.
You might not WANT to feel needy. But your nervous system is extremely evolved to drive you to seek safe emotional connection with others—and it has millions of years of a head start on your wish to be above that.
How else are you going to learn how to handle conflict + calmly disagree if you were never allowed to do that growing up? Of course you’re scared. It takes practice.
I used to do so many things to escape feeling bad except for letting myself just feel bad.
No wonder you think your job is to cheer people up, calm them down, or stay out of their way if that’s exactly what you had to do as a kid to feel safe.
When we struggle as adults, it’s often because the skills that helped us survive the difficulties of childhood aren’t actually helping us anymore.
Once you start to unravel the past and make sense of some of the challenges you dealt with and the ways you learned to cope, you have more freedom to choose how to respond now.
Although a part of you will always be that child with those experiences, your present-day self is allowed to make any changes you want.
Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But that’s okay.
I think most people wish they could be more of who they are and still feel accepted. But it’s understandably hard if, growing up, you were ignored or shamed for being yourself + rewarded when you conformed.
Some days I’m not okay and I’m not trying to fix that. No I don’t need advice on how to not feel this way. I just need time to feel it.
Someone I love gets uncomfortable when I feel ________. But it’s okay if someone I love feels uncomfortable. (I don’t have to save them from a feeling.)
Grieving someone I loved doesn’t appear to be something I’m going to “recover” from.
When we don’t get healthy role modeling on what to do with anger or sadness or hopelessness or loneliness, we turn into adults who don’t know how to engage with those feelings. When those feelings rise up (because they can’t be contained forever), they come out in ways that hurt and confuse us, or other people.
It’s easy to start categorizing some feelings as “good” and some feelings as “bad,” but all our feelings are important and serve a purpose, no matter how uncomfortable.
Noticing is really the most basic form of mindfulness.
When you are upset + I am too defensive to listen, it’s because I’m still learning that it’s okay for people to feel upset with me and not have that mean I’m a bad person.
Feelings don’t always require action.
It’s hard to grow up with adults who can’t help you handle your emotions because they have no idea how to handle their own.
I’m allowed to grieve relationships + things I can’t fix.
I often think we’re really seeking one main thing: people whose eyes, when they see us, light up with delight.
So much of our pain comes from having never been allowed to grieve what we’ve lost.
There are people + experiences I will never be done grieving.
We don’t have to associate grief only with endings. When grief comes to sweep you away, tear you down, and reshape you . . . know that it’s just the beginning—of a life reprioritized around more fully living.
I’m working on being okay not solving all the problems, especially other people’s problems that no one asked me to solve.
It’s okay to accept that something that happened to you still hurts instead of trying not to think about it. I haven’t found denial effective for very long.
I learned the hard way: you can’t learn to feel that you’re valued when you’re spending energy on people who don’t find you valuable.
We don’t have to pick up what others have laid down as true for us, and it’s okay to live your life in a way that others don’t accept or understand.
Choosing to take care of yourself first enables you to do all the things you want to in life, without resentment. Taking good care of yourself is the foundation on which all the other things must rest. Taking good care of yourself includes: knowing yourself, your feelings, and your values listening to your body for when you need rest, solitude, play, or connection having good boundaries with your feelings, relationships, time, and energy being honest about who you are, your values, and what you want in life letting yourself need others and ask for help
One of my values is being strong and helping others. But it’s not helping others if I’m actually tired, miserable, or resentful. I get to come first, even if others don’t like it (and it’s okay for other people to not like it), and so do you.
I try to minimize the amount of time I spend around people who would like me better if I weren’t me.
You hate being needy but anyone who shamed you for needing support, safety, or love was just in conflict with their own neediness. People are built for emotional needs—it’s what defines being human.
You’re not “bothering” me by talking about how you feel. It might be hard for me but I can do hard things.
Being patient with people I care about + not rushing them is also being good to myself + making a little peace with the past.
I had a lot of unravelling to do from growing up thinking someone else knows better than me who I am + what I need.
The best thing about getting older is giving in to how desperately I need to live life on my own terms.
To me, living is folding in the love and the grief with my desire for both perseverance and peace, and feeling mostly like I’m in harmony with life—knowing that I belong to life, and life belongs to me.
