Quotes About Overcoming

At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.

The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it's especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.

our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.

No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren't only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.

I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart. If you let it, your jealousy will devour you.

I'd come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really—all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else.

How could I carry a backpack more than a thousand miles over rugged mountains and waterless deserts if I couldn't even budge it an inch in an air-conditioned motel room? The notion was preposterous and yet I had to lift that pack. It hadn't occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to.

La paura genera paura. La forza genera forza.

At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

Each day I felt as if I were looking up from the bottom of a deep well.

I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.

But the thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.

My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked.

The trees were tall, but I was taller

the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong.

I have carried the weight of my student loan debt for about half of my life now, but I have not been "defined by my 'student loan' identity." I do not even know what a student loan identity is. Do you? What is a student loan identity?

You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don't say this as a condemnation—I need regular reminders to stop feeling sorry for myself too.

No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.

No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

I told her it would likely go on and shed have to survive it. That she'd have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it, and if she wasn't able to do that, then her whole life would be shit, forever and ever and ever.

The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering.