The Plus One (A Brush With Love, #3)

by Mazey Eddings

“We struggle too. We hurt. We handle situations badly or get depressed or anxious or anything else. We’re all flawed.

Your emotional struggles as a human are not a moral judgment of your worth, and they’re not a reflection on your ability to help others.”

Therapy is scary because it requires you to be brave. It’s one of the most radical forms of self-love.”

The problem with being self-aware and introspective while also being, admittedly, emotionally damaged was that Indira could reason through her feelings and their source and how they didn’t serve her, but she also couldn’t stop the ruminating circles of feeling them.

Because feelings matter. They’re chemicals mixing with experiences and some deep, unknown part of a human soul. They make us who we are and I always wanted to help people find a way to steer their ship when those feelings had them lost at sea.”

You can hurt and also be loved. You can feel sadness and also laugh and feel joy. Good emotions can coexist with hard ones. You can struggle and suffer and learn to heal while you also love. The best place to start is by giving yourself permission to feel with abandon. Feel everything.”

It’s war. It’s humans fighting each other. Hurting each other. And people in nice suits sitting at desks in nice offices in safe cities get to decide when and where to send people to hurt each other, for purposes none of us ever get to know.”

“how a great deal of our perceptions of our experiences and the trauma we’ve been a part of creates these fantasies of alternative paths our lives could have taken. We preserve worlds of what could have been. Worlds of what-ifs. It’s easy to get trapped there. What if I hadn’t decided to become a doctor? What if I’d chosen debt over the scholarship? What if I’d been standing there instead of the person I’m now trying to resuscitate? “These alternative realities can claw at us almost as much as the memories of what really happened. But we have to find those sticking points. Ease

our brains away from them. What we have is the present moment. We have our feelings and emotions and the best thing we can do is honor those pieces of ourselves. We can’t change our participation in the past, but we can pave the way for a healthier, mindful future.”