Wishing you could undo a past that can’t be undone.

    Taking out your hurt on people who didn’t cause your hurt.

    Trying to distract yourself from pain by doing something that creates more pain.

    Being unable to forgive yourself.

    Waiting for people to understand you when they don’t even understand themselves.

    Imagining happiness is the place you reach when you get everything done.

    Trying to control things in a universe characterized by unpredictability.

    Avoiding painful memories by resisting a contented present.

    The belief that you have to be happy.

Check your armor

Check your emotional armor is actually protecting you, and not so heavy you can’t move.

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

 Anne Lamott, Berkeley commencement address

A human, being

Your worth is you. Your worth is your presence. Your worth is right there. Your worth isn’t something you earn. Your worth isn’t something you buy. Your worth isn’t something you gain through status or popularity or stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your existence. You were born with worth, as all babies are, and that worth doesn’t disappear simply because you have grown a little older. You are a human, being.

You are waterproof

It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the rain.

PART THREE

Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us.

 Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

Candle

When things go dark, we can’t see what we have. That doesn’t mean we don’t have those things. Those things remain, right there in front of us. All we need is to light a candle, or ignite some hope, and we can see that what we thought was lost was merely hidden.

A bag of moments

Happy moments are precious. We need to hold on to them. Save them. Write them down. Place them in a bag. Have that metaphorical bag with you, for when it seems happy moments could never exist. Sometimes just to be reminded of happiness makes it more possible.

Your most treasured possession

The present is known. The future is unknown. The present is solid. The future is abstract. Ruining the present by worrying about the future is like burning your most treasured possession simply because you might one day lose other possessions that you don’t own yet.

Wolf

Crying releases stress hormones. Swearing increases pain tolerance. Fury can motivate us into action.

Feel what you feel.

Silence and smiles aren’t the only way to respond to pain.

Sometimes it is good to howl.

Burn

I once accidentally set fire to my leg.

I was sixteen years old. It was New Year’s Eve. I had, quite typically for this period of my existence, drunk a lot of cider.

I was at a sleepover party in a friend’s garden. There was a fire outside because it was a cold night, as winter nights tend to be in Nottinghamshire.

Anyway, I was obviously too close to the fire because people were pointing at my leg and shouting wildly and then I looked down and saw my jeans were ablaze.

I quickly patted down my leg and others joined in. The fire was put out but my leg was in agony. I went inside my friend’s house and inspected the wound. It covered about a third of my left thigh. Shades of purple. Oozing. Glistening. Disgusting.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” people asked.

For reasons I still can’t fathom, beyond a deep teenage awkwardness and self-consciousness that was stronger than any pain, I turned down the offer to have an ambulance collect me. But during the night the pain was too intense to sleep, and as I focused on the wound it became increasingly all-encompassing.

So I walked the six miles home, beside a train track. Limping, I was sober now, and the pain was intense—a pulsing kind of pain that was making me delirious.

If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here . . .

At one point I had to stop. I sat down and closed my eyes. A freight train thundered past. I thought I would never make it home. But somehow, I did.

As soon as I got home my sister saw the wound. She gasped and nearly fainted and said I needed to go to the hospital straightaway, and so I went.

My wound was dressed.

“You must never wait in pain,” said the specialist, or words to that effect. It was a message I would think of years later when I was suicidal. “You must see to it straightaway. It doesn’t go away by pretending it isn’t there.”

Virtue

It is entirely human to be imperfect. It is entirely human to be flawed. It is entirely human to have certain prejudices and have internalized some of the more dubious characteristics of the place and time we live in and the environment we grew up in. No one is above the terrifying and miraculous mess of our species. Humans have the capacity for moments of brilliance and goodness, but also an awful lot of fucking up. If we see problematic people only as “people other than us,” we are never going to have the courage to transform ourselves. And it does take courage. Courage, as Maya Angelou put it, is the most important of the virtues because “without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.” Courage is essential for us to look at ourselves without shying away. And, of course, if we make it entirely forbidden to be problematic, we are never going to admit to or address or fix our own flaws with honesty. We need open light to grow. Virtue isn’t something we gain simply by pointing to bad things outside ourselves and making ourselves feel good by contrast. True virtue is something we achieve by looking inward, to our own motives and flaws and cravings, and addressing those sticky and difficult and contradictory parts of ourselves.