Quotes from Heather Havrilesky

Shame creates imaginary worlds inside your head. This haunted house you're creating is forged from your shame. No one else can see it, so you keep trying to describe it to them. You find ways to say, "You don't want any part of this mess. I'm mediocre, aging rapidly, and poor. Do yourself a favor and leave me behind." You want to be left behind, though. That way, no one bears witness to what you've become.

Have lunch, have coffee, and continue to work hard on the things that won't dry up and blow away: Your health, your career, your little art projects or poems or essays, your odd new half-interests, the complicated folds of your sensitivity and your darkness, and your belief in a world that wants you to be happy.

At 6 A.M., I quit email because that's what writers do if they want to get some motherfucking writing done.

I enjoy the illusion of a waiting audience. It makes me feel less invisible and irrelevant, and those are maybe the saddest, stupidest words I've ever written.

Adults are not always so fun. Sometimes I go to parties filled with mature people who know things and act their age and I"m quickly filled with despair. I walk in the door and greet the host and mill about, but in the pit of my stomach I know that leaving home was a mistake. I will not be surprised and delighted. I will not learn something new. I will not even enjoy the sound of my own voice. I will be lulled into a state of excruciating paralysis and self-hatred and other-people hatred.

But maybe it takes a slightly unhinged person to reverse our decades of mindless consumption. Who else would dare suggest, "The basic rule for papers: Discard everything"? (Are they not required to keep tax records in Japan?) Who else would name a section of her book "Photos: Cherish who you are now"? Imagine Southwest Airlines changing their slogan from "Wanna get away?" to "What are you running from?

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma," writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, efficiently summing up Draper, Grey, and Trump in one blow. "It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

Spending more money ensures greater happiness. This is the confused thinking of the duped consumer.

Forever is two immortal elves, sipping pink champagne by a burbling stream, then exploring the wild, gorgeous woods around them in everlasting harmony. Forever is set in New Zealand, not New Jersey.

Being raw means connecting to other people's trials and noticing how we all have to find our own answers; we all have to learn how to show up and breathe without grasping for something to deliver us from our own pain. When you resist your own rawness and pain, you only create more pain for yourself.

I wasn't sure I wanted to spend forever with anyone, least of all myself.

Day in and day out, you are pestered by Barney the Dinosaur, singing about how much everyone loves everyone else and demanding that you turn your frown upside down, in a voice so drippily emphatic that you might like to fashion a shiv out of your sippy cup and gut that purple menace where he stands.

we learn to treat our humanity itself as poisonous, to treat our most human desires as a kind of sickness that can only be cured with outside help.

Instead of toggling between victory and defeat, we have to learn to live in the middle, in the gray area, where a real life can unfold on its own time.

I couldn't just love someone and be loved back. That was too easy. That didn't feel right. I was more familiar with dissatisfaction.

Through the devices in our pockets, we are reminded of our limitless freedom, limitless opportunities, limitless ways to indulge our interests. And yet, our lives feel more difficult to navigate than ever.

What should I be doing right now?" is a question that feels more urgent than ever.

My mother wanted to be needed, but she never wanted to need anyone else. She would be the one baking cherry pies. She would be the one cleaning gutters and painting ceilings and pulling ivy out of the backyard. This is so often the paradox of truly, astoundingly capable people. They're never quite capable of sitting back and allowing the people around them to be the capable ones.

Face-to-face, real-time connection to others feels fraught and awkward compared to the safe distance of digital communication. We maintain intimate virtual contact with strangers but seem increasingly isolated from our closest friends and family members.

Can I step away from this digital maw? Will my voice still matter if no one can hear it?

Our culture exerts a constant pressure on us that severs our relationship to ourselves and each other.

So this is how we live today: by stuffing ourselves to the gills, yet somehow it only makes us more anxious, more confused, and more hungry.

Many of us learn to construct a clear and precise vision of what we want, but we're never taught how to enjoy what we actually have.

Truly believing that my ideas and words have a right to be taken seriously. And if I believed enough in my talents years ago to own them, who knows what I could've created?