In search of comfort and connection
Dating back to AOL-away messages
Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night to realize I was dreaming of sentences written in script across a notebook. Some nights I find comfort in this, a nudge from above. Other days it's exhausting. It's as if my brain doesn't truly rest.
I write, not to keep track of my days but, to release the spiral, to slow it down, to glean some insight from my own questions and creativity. But when my sentences don't quite hit the note I'm looking for…I turn to other writers.
My collection of quotes dates back to AOL-away messages (the drama of a teenager). It’s always been rooted in this belief that I'll discover some wisdom to help me make better sense of myself, my feelings, the workings of my brain, and this incessant longing for something I carry with me. Lately, I've spent half of my time riddled with sadness and the other half reading, searching for words to help me make sense of this persistent heaviness I carry with me.
The reasons for my battles with anxiety and depression are a whirlwind - hard to land. It's not always clear to me why on any given day managing my thoughts and impending doom requires so much effort. Part of my journey is in accepting this as my way of being and the other half is in leaning into the beautiful ease, energy, and joy I get to experience on other days. I think most people with similar battles, consciously or unconsciously, try to create a buffer between themselves and others. It's why I believe sharing your confusion or pain is so important. If we fail to do so, we risk becoming pretend versions of ourselves held together by superficial connections.
Reading is my world with no buffers, where I get to exist completely. It's my search for connection, comfort, and understanding in my way of being and how I experience the world. It's an imaginary conversation with an author teaching me, guiding me.
And so…I present to you a round-up of words that expressed my thoughts better than I could. A collection of quotes that brought me hope, comfort, and connection this year.
May we always remember that no one has mastered this Game. All we can do is the next and most necessary thing and then share the wisdom because someone, somewhere needs it.
By Joan Didion: “I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people.”
"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."
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Rainer Maria Rilke: “How could we forget the myths about dragons who at the last moment transform into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses waiting to see us act just once with courage. Perhaps every terror is, at its core, something helpless that wants our help"
"Why would you want to exclude from your existence any unrest, any pain, any heaviness? For you don't know how yet these will shape you."
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James Baldwin
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read"
"An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are. I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too."
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Gilda Radner: “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment, and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”
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Frida Kahlo: "I think that little by little I'll be able to solve my own problems and survive."
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Ernest Hemingway: "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."
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Carl Jung: "If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious…but if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate."