Quotes About Self-discovery

A lot of people don't know who they are as a wrestler. Even people that walk into the doors of the Performance Center. They might be world-class athletes or models, but they don't know who they are in the ring.

One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.

I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'

When I started wrestling, I started only to get in shape. I found out that a wrestling school had opened in Ireland, and I wanted to go because I was hanging out with the wrong crowd and I wanted to turn my life around.

From wrestling, I learned that I was capable of much more than I thought I was.

From wrestling, I learned what I'm not going to do again.

When I started wrestling and then turned into the Evil Queen, I created this character who I needed in my personal life. This woman who is strong, intelligent, confident, empowering. That's what I needed in my personal life.

I guess because I never pictured myself wrestling, I find myself wanting to push every limit possible in this industry.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

The broken heart on my right finger represents me before I figured out who I was, and the full heart on my left is because I'm left-handed, I use that to write my music, and my music helped me obtain my direction in life.

Somebody said to me, 'You should keep a journal of this period in your life and really write down this stuff.' But that makes me a little uneasy.

I wanted to write a book about what it's like to be 50 and trying to reinvent yourself - that struggle. There are all these books and inspirational speakers talking about being a lifelong learner, and it's so great to reinvent yourself, the brand of you. And I wanted to say, you know, it's not like that. It's actually really painful.

I wasn't Lennon, or I wasn't McCartney. I was me. And the only reason I started to write songs was because I thought, 'Well, if they can write them, I can write them.'

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone - because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

I write about love, but it's me wanting to be in love. I've never been in love. I love my mom, my dad. I want to be in love. I think I have to allow myself to get there. I'm just so in love with music. It's weird. I'm at a crossroads because I want to be in love.

I write for myself things that I've gone through.

I write about what I'm going through.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me - jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher - and becoming stronger as a result.

Growing up, nobody I knew even knew a writer. So it was a big adventure and something that I've wrestled with my whole life. I think it's a journey worth taking, really finding out who you are and what you do well.

Thank God for being a writer, because you do sort of find out what you think by the process of writing.