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February 7 - February 18, 2025
Self-compassion makes you feel understood and strengthened; self-pity makes you feel powerless and pathetic.
Perfectionists waste so much energy trying to churn their disappointment into something else.
Your power lies in practicing self-compassion, then taking ownership over your life now.
The experiences you went through made you skilled at disconnection instead of connection, and now sometimes you have trouble with the latter.
oof
When you’re not connected to yourself, connecting to others can seem pointless. It’s not.
Just because the connection is falling flat now doesn’t mean it won’t kick in retroactively later.
If you’re not aware that liminal spaces exist, being in one can feel like you don’t belong anywhere and that you’ve failed.
Grief is always the admission charge for major transition. You have to let go of the parts of you that you’ve outgrown, hence, the emptiness.
When you ruminate, you mistake replay for reflection. When you catastrophize, you mistake worrying for preparation.
While you may sometimes need medication or coffee or music or therapy or some other kind of ameliorative tinkering to get you thriving, that doesn’t mean you’re broken; that means you are a human being alive in the world.
Taking the initiative to ask for support is uncomfortable, but perhaps spending long bouts of time in this one precious life of yours feeling disconnected and stuck is more uncomfortable?
“Movement changes your nervous system.”
Touch activates the care system and the parasympathetic nervous system to help us calm down and feel safe.
If you’re struggling with your mental health, don’t assume it’s because there’s something wrong with you; assume it’s because you don’t have the support you need.
Don’t do the thing where you resist connecting to support because you feel that you should’ve mastered your problem
Regression is a natural part of growth. You will regress, and when you do, you need support around you to remind you that regression and failure are not the same thing.
You won’t be for everyone; that doesn’t mean you need to change.
Self-imposed upper limits on what you can and cannot do and who you can and cannot be are control tactics.
You’re trying to control your vulnerability to getting hurt.
What doesn’t kill you might traumatize you to the point of disintegrating your memory recall.
It was never the terrible things that happened to you that made you stronger; it was the resiliency-building skills you engaged to process the terrible things.
Support is not just an exchange of information or aid; support is an exchange of connection.
Connection is the ultimate arbiter of mental wellness. When you’re disconnected, you can’t heal or grow; you can only numb and languish. Connection isn’t something that happens to you; it’s a choice you make.
You’re defeated because you ran out of energy, not because you ran out of time.
Psychologists have long known that procrastination is not a time-management issue; it’s an emotional-regulation issue.
Anything you do to protect, save, restore, and build your energy is productive. Productive activities include but are not limited to sleeping, listening to music, lingering in bookstores, taking a bath, washing your car, completing the work assignment, good conversation, cooking, redecorating, watching a movie, getting a manicure, playing basketball, reading, walking, and singing in the shower.
You are not on the earth to complete tasks and then die. You are not a bar graph of output. You are a human being.
Grief is a word that’s used interchangeably with bereavement, but grief is not exclusively about the physical death of a person. You grieve whenever you have to let go of something that you’re not ready to let go of.
Seeking a complete list of reasons “why” is an analytical approach to grief. You can’t apply analytics to grief. You can’t perfectly understand grief.
Healing is less about establishing resolution and more about being able to center yourself in the parts of your life that remain unresolved.
Difficult emotions need to be allowed to lie there like a brick. They’re feelings, not who you are.
Thoughts and feelings don’t need to operate with an itinerary. It’s okay to hold something for a long time, look at it, turn it over, feel it, think about it, turn it over again, talk about it, write about it, and then look up and say, “I don’t know.” It’s okay to not have closure.
restoration requires decompression. Decompressing involves taking the pressure off, not piling it on—that’s what decompression means, a reduction in pressure. Perfectionists are bad at decompressing because they thrive on pressure.
When they’re not restored, Parisian perfectionists use people-pleasing as a shortcut to connection.
You’re here to work smarter, not harder. You’re a perfectionist; you already work hard enough.
Reframes are powerful because one of the best ways to change the way you think is to change the way you speak.
Reframes don’t just help you shift the way you see your own life; they can also help shift the way you see the lives of others.
Women who elect not to have children are not operating at a deficit. Not only do some women not want kids; some women are also completely, joyfully fulfilled by not having kids. These women are not avoiding a full life, they’re not “missing out,” they’re not secretly hurting, and they’re not going to regret not having children.
screaming from the rooftop!!!!!!!!!
Conversely, messy and Parisian perfectionists tend to overexpress and underexplain. Others may understand how both types of perfectionists feel, in addition to having a strong sense of who they are deep down, but there’s a great deal of confusion about what these two types of perfectionists want, need, or are thinking.
Pride can misguide us in dangerous ways. It’s easy to mistake isolation for independence and being stubborn for being strong.
When your suffering is invisible to other people (and when you’re adept at keeping it that way), you need to be the one to fire the flare.
While you sleep, you consolidate memories and clear synaptic space to learn new things the next day.[12] Your body deploys the cellular equivalent of thousands of tiny hands to repair all your muscles, including your heart.[13] You stabilize your metabolism and endocrine function, the latter of which helps you regulate your emotions (i.e., you have fewer mood swings).[14]
We don’t take the “I want it, so I’ll do it” approach because we don’t trust ourselves.
We’re secretly nervous that if left to our own devices, we’ll spin out of control, hurt everyone around us, and then go crazy.
The reason people binge on immediate gratification is not that they want too much. The reason people binge on immediate gratification is that they’re burnt the fuck out.
When you don’t trust yourself, you move through life trying to memorize the right thing to do instead of trusting yourself to know it.
When you don’t trust yourself, you’re waiting to catch yourself in a mistake so you can pounce on your own certainty about how unworthy of trust you are. You get petty. You become fixated on your mistakes, and you keep a tally of those mistakes.
Accolades don’t deliver self-trust. You can rise all the way to the tippy-top-teetering tier of your field. Without trust in yourself, you’ll be as insecure at the top as you were before you started the climb.
Be wary of the need to prove to yourself that you trust yourself via some big bold move you’re not ready for
oh. damn
Your self-destructive patterns are the least interesting thing about you; why are you allowing them to lead your identity?
