Quotes About Struggle

Every woman who goes into the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of this hard life." Then I added a few words of my own. "Please be careful today and every day.

The typhoon that hit us wasn't the worst we'd ever experienced, but we were all so much weaker in our bodies and minds that the impact was just one more remorseless blow.

For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me – as a girl and later as a woman – to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

And sometimes, God asks us to wrestle with the unfamiliar until it becomes our new familiar. Until we can breathe freely in that new place.

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.

grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.

Life is an impossible twist of choice and circumstance. One rarely exists without the other.

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster." —Friedrich Nietzsche

I didn't understand depression, how it was a con and a thief of joy. How it lured people away, making them believe that the world was better off without them.

You can't squeeze blood from a stone. You can try, but you do all the bleeding.

Dysfunction isn't a choice, it's a disease.

Honestly, I tried not to think about my sister much. Or my mother. I have been guilty of doing what it takes to bury most of my memories when it comes to that- from junk food to booze to drugs, there are few poisons with which I haven't experimented. I've found a million ways to keep the demons in a comfortable, quiet stupor, lazing around on my inner couches.

It's so hard for the strongest among us to stay sane, isn't it, under the conditions we have come to think of as normal?

Give up, she wanted to tell them. You lost. The world is crap, and no amount of communicating is going to change it.

I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.

Her throat felt constricted, breath

She told me I didn't understand depression, how it was a con and a thief of joy. How it lured people away, making them believe that the world was better off without them.

All this time, she'd wondered how she could live knowing what darkness awaited. With Shawn, she realized all of it, light and dark, life and death, was one terrible, beautiful mingle, and that the whole point was to just live well, while you could.

Anger, disappointment, sadness were the all-too-familiar horsemen preceding any encounter with her family.

She understood now, how you turned away until you couldn't. Until the pain of knowing and doing nothing was greater than the fear of what might come next.

Grief and trauma, I remind myself, are not linear experiences. There are good days and bad ones, hard dips into despair, moments of light and hope.

What is it that they say? That thing about happy and unhappy families? That happiness is all the same, but misery is unique?