This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

Avoid self-pity by taking responsibility for everything that happens to you, even if somebody else is at fault. By taking responsibility, I don’t mean play doormat. I mean, repair yourself. Move forward. Move on. Then, only then, see if you can wrangle some empathy.

When you feel spontaneously excited by something—a new career you never thought about, a haircut you see in a magazine and want—shame is the voice that brings you “back down to earth.”

Harboring a chest filled with rage year after year wears you away. It grinds you down until you are all nerves and bone. You need to get rid of it. This is where rage is a lot like physical obesity: the treatment is similar. The more rage you contain, the harder you need to work physically. And by “work” I do not mean “emotional work” as in therapy

Shame is also a covert and effective bullying method.

When you try to do or be something, you can’t do it or be it. Because trying is not the same as being. Trying flies in a circle around the moment and being is inside of it. You must be.

To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point. Each thing should change you, if ever so slightly.

But the story of Endurance has always been for me the most perfect example of what hope is, what hope can do, and how there are times in life when logic and reason and probability must be recognized, but then ignored.

Saying just the right thing after a considerable, awkward pause is far less effective than saying the wrong thing with perfect timing, I’m telling you.

This is what I’m saying: you hate your life. But you don’t know what life is. Life is too huge for you to possibly hate. If you hate life, you haven’t seen enough of it.