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I wished away my life, unaware I was the proprietor of a material more valuable than gold: youth.
the mere act of asking for help was, in itself, healing.
some of the most important relationships of your teenage life will take place in your head.
You have to know yourself before you can allow someone else to know you too.
‘It’s not the absence of fun, it’s the absence of fear.’ Keep this in mind when you are looking for someone to share your life with – someone who’ll bring fun without fear. Someone whose company you love. Someone who makes you feel alive and safe and understood. Those are the specifics you should be looking for. The rest doesn’t matter so much.
When someone talks about something all the time – whether it concerns them or not – it means it is a topic that terrorizes them to some degree.
Instead of looking at your life and seeing the lack, look for the abundance.
Keep putting love out into the world and it will come back to you in one way or another. That, I’ve learnt, is one of life’s only guarantees.
Perhaps it’s a man thing – maybe you’re disappointed in men and they’ve lost your trust. I get it. Every time I open a newspaper another one has disappointed me.
Loving someone is not an act of control, it’s an act of surrender. You can make careful considerations about who you choose to merge your life with, but from there you have to let go.
‘There are a lot of long, dark nights, Dolly,’ he told me, solemn and sleep-deprived. ‘Make sure you marry someone you can have a great conversation with.’
The first 45 years of a woman’s life and the choices she makes are under enormous pressure and scrutiny.
Personally, there’s nothing I find less hot than a shady fella.
My partner and I got together through an affair, and now I’m ashamed of being happy.
what.
Most of us will experience it at some point: the person who loves us is not the person we want to be with, or the person we want to be with is not the one who loves us. There’s a reason why Shakespeare and Austen got so much material out of it.
‘The heart is a very resilient little muscle.’ That’s a line from a film that I quote too much. But I find more truth in it with every year I get older.
(Although, in the future, I’d avoid describing yourself as ‘very funny’ and let other people decide that for you. The more you insist on it, the less true it becomes to everyone who listens to you. Just a little something I’ve learnt on this journey we call life.)
You’ve lived enough life by now to know that you can’t select an array of random specifics that suit your whims and expect to find a human that replicates them entirely. That is not a suitable hobby for anyone other than 14-year-old girls casting spells to conjure their dream boyfriend by burning lists of adjectives over a makeshift bonfire in the garden.
When we oppose someone’s views, our immediate assumption is probably that they’re ignorant.
It sounds like you have raised a woman who likes herself. That’s reason enough for a good night’s sleep.
It’s OK – every single one of us makes mistakes and all of us have regrets (I personally don’t trust anyone without them,
There’s always a space between knowing exactly what you have to do and finding the strength and courage to do it.
It is a beautiful, terrifying fact: just as our vulnerability to heartbreak never changes, neither does our vulnerability to fall in love.
Grief is an electric shock that tells us we are fully alive – it means we’re connecting and creating and caring. We’re participating. We’re making the most of this short go. We’re opening up and taking risks, we’re tangling ourselves in other lives.
To feel like you can be with yourself – that you can keep yourself safe and be at peace in your own company – I now believe is the greatest and quietest confidence a human can know.
