Quotes About Identity

I remember reading a divorced woman's experience of getting to know a new lover after her decades-long marriage ended: "I will never lock eyes in the delivery room with David," she wrote. "I've never met his mother.

Our training has taught us theories and tools and techniques, but whirring beneath our hard-earned expertise is the fact that we know just how hard it is to be a person. Which is to say, we still come to work each day as ourselves—with our own sets of vulnerabilities, our own longings and insecurities, and our own histories. Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I'm a card-carrying member of the human race.

therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are so that you aren't trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life.

part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are so that you aren't trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life.

Sometimes I wonder, Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life? Am I really qualified for this? Everyone wages this internal battle to some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? But no matter where people fall on those continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are so that you aren't trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life.

Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It's like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you're glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety.

There is no such thing as a perfect name.

She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.

I'm one of those people who other people like but never remember. I think most of the world is probably like me. Until recently nothing about me was outstanding, and then my mother got cancer. It's a disease people like to talk about, so I'm more popular now. And when I flip through magazines, I read the breast cancer articles first, even before the numerology column.

That's why I'm compelled to tell this story - don't we all have one secret that has shaped us we are burning to reveal? - to convince myself that I'm entitled to my own life.

I had wanted to get married, but I realized now that I never wanted to be a 'wife.

If you look closely you'll find all my lovers inscribed on my skin.

wanted to live in the dark as a teenager until I realized that ugliness already makes you invisible

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can't be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There's nothing for it but to get to know it.

Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked.

I'm trying my best, but I feel like such a spare part.

If a nuclear disaster occurred, and you had to live out those final painful days just stretched out somewhere thinking about your life--This is who I am. This is what I love. This is what I believe--who would you want hearing your whispers? Or perhaps better: Who do you trust to hear your whispers? Whose breath do you want mingled with your own? Whose flesh still warm beside you?

he was convinced that if he claimed all the parts he really loved he would be able to make peace with everything else.

The longest and most expensive journey you will ever make is the one to yourself.

Remember, you're unique. And so is everyone else.

But the problem is, people tend to assign you the role of the person you are at your worst, you know?

She didn't understand it, but everything about him reminded her that she was a woman.