Having been (kind of) dumped has led me.. pushed me to find other activities that could fill my time up. I wanted to do stuff that were productive, positive, and ultimately will result to being an overall better person physically, mentally.. all aspects. That was a daunting task. I am way far from my comfort zone and I find myself actively and consciously trying to do stuff just so I can keep my mind busy. It is really difficult to feel sad almost every 15 minutes so I have to keep myself busy in order to stay sane.
I've been filling my time with work, and when I'm not busy doing that I try to work out since it boosts endorphins or some happy hormone WHICH IS ACTUALLY PRETTY LEGIT. I feel really good after working out but let's be fuhreal. I am not the type of person who can work out for the most part of my day. I can't. My body refuses to. After About 20 to 30 minutes of booty shaking, and drinking up the positive vibe it gives me afterwards, I'm back to feeling sad and lonely. Shit son.
So I tried reading.
It just came to me one day. On my birthday, actually. I was feeling pretty shitty that afternoon and was also feeling very melancholic and lonely and other words synonymous to that. I bought a book the day before which was The Happiness Project but I just couldn't connect to the author. She was happily married, with two daughters, she was very systematic and enjoyed running.. She was basically the opposite of me. It was cool how she was giving pointers on how to live THE BEST AND HAPPIEST YEAR OF YOUR LIFE! or something like that but It didn't really inspire me. I was on the part wherein she was just a few weeks into her project but I just couldn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. But I still do plan on finishing the book hopefully it gets fun in the middle so I wouldn't waste my P355.
I just wanted to read something that I could connect to. A book written by someone who has gone through what I am going through and I wanna know how she healed herself and became the person that she is now. I remembered that I had a copy of Eat, Pray, Love and it was like a match made in heaven.
Being recently uncoupled, I am now really into the philosophical, Buddhist thing lately. I wanted to learn the how to detach expectations and desires from people and material things. It has always been something that was easier said than done but I really wanted to learn how to do it. I don't think I've been single since I was 15. There was always a guy who occupied my time and I haven't gone through the true moving on process.
I reread Eat, Pray, Love. I don't think I even finished the book nor the movie. It was just perfect for me. The author went through a divorce and another shitty relationship afterwards then she realized she should take a break from all of this and just put herself first. She was also into the whole spiritual thing.. basically everything that I wanted to do for myself now. I wanted to be my own support group. I want to be enough for myself so I can be enough for my next partner.
I've been highlighting parts of the book, parts that have I have identified with, touched me or inspired me. It feels really therapeutic to read a book from someone who actually went through something worse than what I am going through and have found her way to becoming whole. Here are a few excerpts:
"This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude"
"I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone."
"Similarly, when the question is raised, 'What kind of God do you believe in?' my answer is easy: 'I believe in a magnificent God'."
"'Go back to bed', said this omniscient interior voice, because you don't need to know the final answer right now, at three o'clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. Go back to bed because I love you. Go back to bed because the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer."
"Imagine his surprise to discover that the happiest most confident woman he'd ever met was actually-when you got her alone-a murky hole of bottomless grief."
"I was despondent and dependent, needing more care than an armful of premature infant triplets. His withdrawal only made me more needy, and my neediness only advanced his withdrawals, until soon he was retreating under fire of my weeping pleas of, 'Where are you going? What happened to us?'"
"It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have that thing even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So that's it. You have reached infatuation's final destination-the complete and merciless devaluation of self."
"I would lie there beside David's beautiful, inaccessible sleeping body and I would spin into a panic of loneliness and meticulously detailed suicidal thoughts. Every part of my body pained me."
"But there emerged a pattern: I would separate from David, get my strength and confidence back, and then (attracted as always by my strength and confidence) his passion for me would rekindle. Respectfully, soberly and intelligently, we would discuss trying again, always with some new plan for minimizing our apparent incompatibilities. We were so committed to solving this thing. Because how could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work."
"I would cling to him and I'd end up destroyed all over again. And he'd end up gone."
"Om Namah Sivaya, meaning, 'I honor the divinity that resides within me'"
"I wanted to have a lasting experience of God. Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time."
"You worry too much. Always you get too emotional, too nervous. If I promise you that you will never have any reason in your life to ever worry about anything, will you believe me?"
"Four feet on the ground, a head full of foliage, looking at the world through the heart."
"Often I was still overcome with a desire to sacrifice everything for the love of him. Other times, I had quite the opposite instinct-to put as many continents and oceans as possible between me and this guy, in the hope of finding peace and happiness."
"'Where did you get the idea you aren't allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You're a constituent-you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known. So put your opinion out there. Make your case. Believe me-it will at least be taken into consideration."
"I became filled with a grand sense of protection, surrounded by the collective goodwill of so many mighty souls."
"'Dal center della mia vita venne ulna grande fontana'… 'From the center of my ife, there came a great fountain'"
"God is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, 'L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stele' … 'The love that moves the sun and the other stars'".
"He asks why, exactly, I think I deserve a vacation in Rome when I've made such a rubble of my life."
"I tried so hard to fight the endless sobbing. I remember asking myself one night, while I was curled up in the same old corner of my same old couch in tears yet again over the same old repetition of sorrowful thoughts. 'Is there anything about this scene you can change, Liz?' and all I could think to do was stand up, while still sobbing, and try to balance on one food in the middle of my living room. Just to prove that while I couldn't stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue, I was not yet totally out of control: at least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot. Hey, it was a start."
"The world isn't a nursery. But the very fact that his world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort."
"I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it-I will love you through that, as well. If you don't need the medication, I will love you, too. There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me."
"You must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new."
"'So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper?"
"I replied to him 'First of all,' I said, 'I'm very sorry but this isn't your business anymore. And second, to answer your question… Yes.'"
"When I get lonely these days, I think: 'So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.'"
"But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything."
"I will protect you from your own insecurity. I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself."
"Dear God, I could use a little break from this cycle, to give myself some space to discover what I look like and talk like when I'm not trying to merge with someone."
"Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find a way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope."
"I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.
...Even in the Eternal City, says the Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation."
"We loved each other. That was never the question. It's just that we couldn't figure out how to stop making each other desperately, shriekingly, soul-punishingly miserable."
"What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together-in misery, but happy not to be apart."
"But it just destroys me to not be able to count on that affection when I need it."
"I not only can find happiness without David, but must. No matter how much I love him (and I do love him, in stupid excess), I have to say goodbye to this person now. And I have to make it stick."
"I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.
...Even in the Eternal City, says the Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation."
"We loved each other. That was never the question. It's just that we couldn't figure out how to stop making each other desperately, shriekingly, soul-punishingly miserable."
"What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together-in misery, but happy not to be apart."
"But it just destroys me to not be able to count on that affection when I need it."
"I not only can find happiness without David, but must. No matter how much I love him (and I do love him, in stupid excess), I have to say goodbye to this person now. And I have to make it stick."
"Why can't you just admit that you don't want to live in unhappiness anymore? That neither of you does. And it's better to realize it now, by the way, than in the delivery room when you're at 5cm."
"It's the emotional recoil that kills you, the shock of stepping off the track of a conventional lifestyle and losing all the embracing comforts that keep so many people on track forever."
"But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then do it again the next day?"
"...and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab on to the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt-this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."
"I adore the cause of the universe... I adore the one whose eyes are the sun, the moon and fire... you are everything to me, O god of gods..."
"We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace."
"You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."
"Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise."
"The word 'Guru' is composed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means 'darkness', the second one means 'light'. Out of the darkness and into the light"
"The universe will shift, destiny's molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need."
"You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts and you are the slave to your emotions."
"You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice being strong, instead."
"Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing and you were in the best possible place in the world for it-in a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India."
"But I really loved him."
"Big deal. So you fell in love with someone. Don't you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. I mean you got zapped, kiddo. But that love you felt, that's just the beginning. You just got a taste of love. That's just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. Wait til you see how much more deeply you can love than that. Heck, you have the capacity to someday love the whole world. It's your destiny. Don't laugh."
"I think the reason it's so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed he was my soulmate."
"He probably was. Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soulmate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soulmate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soulmate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soulmate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soulmates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can't let this one go. It's over. His purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of that marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now it's over. Problem is, you can't accept that this relationship had a real short shelf life. You're like a dog at the dump-you're just lickin' at an empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you're not careful, that can's gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it."
"But I love him."
"So love him."
"But I miss him."
"So miss him. Send him some love and light everytime you think about him, and the drop it. You're just afraid to let go of the last bits of him because they you'll be really alone and you are scared to death of what will happen if you're really alone. But here's what you gotta understand. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you're using right now to obsess about this guy, you'll have a vacuum there, an open spot-a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with that doorway? It will rush in-God will rush in-and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop using him to block the door. Let it go."
"But I wish me and him could..."
"See, now that's your problem. You're wishing too much. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be."
"Life didn't go your way for once. And nothing pisses off a control freak more than life not goin' her way."
"I don't want you walking around inside my head anymore."
"Shut the door, then."
"You meet lots of apathetic people in this world, of course, but you also meet some people who seem to be able to gracefully accept the terms upon which the universe operates and who genuinely don't seem troubled by its paradoxes and injustices."
"I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these acquisitions and accomplishments-they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death."
"You gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you."
"Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in midflight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. Life continued to go on."
"Why are you so sure that your micromanagement of every moment in this whole world is so essential? Why don't you let it be?"
"...Which is getting embarrassing, to be quite honest. I mean-here I am in this sacred place of study in the middle of India, and all I can think about is my ex boyfriend? What am I, in eighth grade?"
"There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history 'How much do you love me?' and 'Who's in charge?' Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us and cause war, grief and suffering."
"When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward."
"How do you keep this motivation to stay with it?"
"What's the alternative? To quite whenever something gets challenging? To futz around your whole life, miserable, and incomplete?"
"In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to adjust ourselves around discomfort-physical, emotional, and psychological-in order to evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Vipassana meditation teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life, but if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass."
"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook.) I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts."
"Control your thoughts?"
"This is not about repression or denial. Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feelings are not occurring. Instead, admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they come from and why they arrived, and then-with great forgiveness and fortitude-dismissing them."
"I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore."
"Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear."
"But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given, and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't."
"It's the emotional recoil that kills you, the shock of stepping off the track of a conventional lifestyle and losing all the embracing comforts that keep so many people on track forever."
"But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then do it again the next day?"
"...and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab on to the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt-this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."
"I adore the cause of the universe... I adore the one whose eyes are the sun, the moon and fire... you are everything to me, O god of gods..."
"We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace."
"You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."
"Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise."
"The word 'Guru' is composed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means 'darkness', the second one means 'light'. Out of the darkness and into the light"
"The universe will shift, destiny's molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need."
"You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts and you are the slave to your emotions."
"You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice being strong, instead."
"Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing and you were in the best possible place in the world for it-in a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India."
"But I really loved him."
"Big deal. So you fell in love with someone. Don't you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. I mean you got zapped, kiddo. But that love you felt, that's just the beginning. You just got a taste of love. That's just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. Wait til you see how much more deeply you can love than that. Heck, you have the capacity to someday love the whole world. It's your destiny. Don't laugh."
"I think the reason it's so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed he was my soulmate."
"He probably was. Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soulmate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soulmate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soulmate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soulmate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soulmates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can't let this one go. It's over. His purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of that marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now it's over. Problem is, you can't accept that this relationship had a real short shelf life. You're like a dog at the dump-you're just lickin' at an empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you're not careful, that can's gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it."
"But I love him."
"So love him."
"But I miss him."
"So miss him. Send him some love and light everytime you think about him, and the drop it. You're just afraid to let go of the last bits of him because they you'll be really alone and you are scared to death of what will happen if you're really alone. But here's what you gotta understand. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you're using right now to obsess about this guy, you'll have a vacuum there, an open spot-a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with that doorway? It will rush in-God will rush in-and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop using him to block the door. Let it go."
"But I wish me and him could..."
"See, now that's your problem. You're wishing too much. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be."
"Life didn't go your way for once. And nothing pisses off a control freak more than life not goin' her way."
"I don't want you walking around inside my head anymore."
"Shut the door, then."
"You meet lots of apathetic people in this world, of course, but you also meet some people who seem to be able to gracefully accept the terms upon which the universe operates and who genuinely don't seem troubled by its paradoxes and injustices."
"I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these acquisitions and accomplishments-they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death."
"You gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you."
"Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in midflight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. Life continued to go on."
"Why are you so sure that your micromanagement of every moment in this whole world is so essential? Why don't you let it be?"
"...Which is getting embarrassing, to be quite honest. I mean-here I am in this sacred place of study in the middle of India, and all I can think about is my ex boyfriend? What am I, in eighth grade?"
"There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history 'How much do you love me?' and 'Who's in charge?' Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us and cause war, grief and suffering."
"When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward."
"How do you keep this motivation to stay with it?"
"What's the alternative? To quite whenever something gets challenging? To futz around your whole life, miserable, and incomplete?"
"In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to adjust ourselves around discomfort-physical, emotional, and psychological-in order to evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Vipassana meditation teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life, but if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass."
"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook.) I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts."
"Control your thoughts?"
"This is not about repression or denial. Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feelings are not occurring. Instead, admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they come from and why they arrived, and then-with great forgiveness and fortitude-dismissing them."
"I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore."
"Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear."
"But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given, and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't."
