self

“On the Sydney train, I sometimes like to play a quiet game with myself, where I imagine each commuter through the eyes of someone who adores them. The oil-stained man becomes a gentle, loving father. The teenage girl biting her sleeve becomes someone’s irreplaceable best friend. The elderly woman with the fierce stare becomes a widow whose late

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“Ultimately, the most challenging intimacy is the one we cultivate with ourselves. To sit alone and meet our own eyes without flinching. To know our hunger, our contradictions, our unbearable tenderness, and respond with compassion rather than contempt. Self-intimacy is not navel-gazing; it’s the soil from which all other closenessgrows. Without

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“To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one

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“A person who knows they love 1980s Japanese jazz, pumpkin soup, moral complexity, and peach-skin textures has a better chance of finding someone who loves those same things, or someone who complements them in ways that are interesting.

A specific taste profile lets others see where their weirdness fits against yours, like puzzle pieces, but

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Container people are rare and transformative. They hold space for you, and in that, they hold you. With them, you don’t have to measure your words or pre-chew your thoughts. You don’t have to shrink your bigness or inflate your quietness. You don’t have to be only the parts of yourself that are easily lovable. You know - intuitively, somatically -

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