pain might be a total asshole, but it can inadvertently show us how much space we have inside. It can even expand that space. And enable us to experience the equivalent quantity of joy or hope or love or contentment at some future point in time.

Forward momentum is great. But we also need sideways momentum.

It is good to be weird. It is good to be eccentric. It is good to be separate from the crowd. The philosopher John Stuart Mill thought it was almost a civic duty to be eccentric, to break the tyranny of conformity and custom. But even if we don’t feel outwardly eccentric, we all have eccentric parts. Thoughts that crop up on the peripheries of our

Your value is not a condition of productivity or exercise or body shape or something you lose via inactivity. Value is not a plate that needs to be continually spun. The value is there. It is intrinsic, innate. It is in the “being” not the “doing.”

The hardest dream of all to achieve is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the

our external circumstances don’t need to change in order for our perspective to change. And the forests we find ourselves in are metaphorical, and sometimes we are unable to escape them, but with a change of perspective we can live among the trees.

Depression lies. And while the feelings themselves were real, the things they led me to believe were resolutely not.

Hope isn’t the same thing as happiness. You don’t need to be happy to be hopeful. You need instead to accept the unknowability of the future, and that there are versions of that future that could be better than the present. Hope, in its simplest form, is the acceptance of possibility.

Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles. It’s about the determination to keep walking forward.