~ Understanding ~

How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do?
And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all?


Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel.


The problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say, or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour.


They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world.


They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can.


Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.

~ Reality ~

People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all.
People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit.
Love hurts.
Feelings are disturbing.


People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous.
How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel?
Pain is meant to wake us up.
People try to hide their pain.
But they’re wrong.


Pain is something to carry
You feel your strength in the experience of pain.
It’s all in how you carry it.
That’s what matters.


Pain is a feeling.
Your feelings are a part of you.
Your own reality.


If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality.
You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.



― Jim Morrison

~ Emotion ~

You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless.
You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct.
If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him.
Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.'
Especially when you put it with somebody you love.


Love shouldn't be like that.
Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain?
They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds.
But you know what?
You go up top and what do you see?
His head. The clouds never cover the head.
His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up.
They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him.


You can't own a human being.
You can't lose what you don't own.
Suppose you did own him.
Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you?
You really want somebody like that?
Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door?
You don't, do you? And neither does he.
You're turning over your whole life to him.
Your whole life, girl.
And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him?


He can't value you more than you value yourself ......."


— Toni Morrison

~ Excuses ~

Why Do We Make Excuses?

If you are someone who is a habitual excuse maker it might be a good idea to ask yourself why you deliberately choose to be less than truthful. Do you fear the scrutiny of friends, family, or coworkers? Are you uncomfortable with opening yourself up to others? Sometimes, making up a lame excuse to avoid attending a social event is done for self-preservation. Are you afraid your attendance would make you feel inadequate, vulnerable, or foolish?

Are your excuses meant to inflate your worthiness in the eyes of others? Ego does play a factor in habitual excuse making. However, indulging in ego-boosting through excuse making will likely have the reverse result: deflated personal self-worth. You can trick others into believing a lie, but convincing yourself is not as easy. Or is it? If you tell a lie convincingly enough and you get away with it you may also begin believing it yourself. It's true. Overtime, an excuse-maker will start buying into his own cons and, as a result, live a lie.

How Does it Feel Being Dishonest?

The reason why we make excuses is probably not as important as the "feeling" associated with being less than honest. Excuses are meant to hide our shortcomings or give a better light to our failures. Everyone gets that. We can all justify our reasons for making excuses. But, how does it feel having been deceitful? If it doesn't feel good, time to change your habit of making excuses. Also, if making excuses gives you a false sense of euphoria, that's not good either.

Stop Making Excuses.

Changing deceptive behaviors can be a little tricky for the chronic excuse maker. Twisting the truth becomes a way of life, almost an art form. Whenever excuses are found out to be erroneous, instead of giving a sincere apology for being untruthful the person will attempt to craft a creative non-apology (another excuse) that just adds to the original deception. This is called "digging yourself into a deeper hole."

Taking responsibility for your actions is the grown-up thing to do. Admitting your failures and accepting that you are not perfect may be hard to swallow at first. But, as you stop making excuses for yourself, you will soon realize how emotionally freeing your life can be. I know it is cliché - but "Honesty (really) is the best policy."

~ Solitude ~

• All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.-

• Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.--Thomas Browne

• Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.--Alice Koller

• Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all life's greatest tests alone.--Agnes Macphail

• Each of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. … When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. --John O'Donohue (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• I feel solitude as the blessing . It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.--Peter Hoeg (Smilla's Sense of Snow)

• I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.--Brenda Ueland

• I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.--Albert Einstein

• I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.--Henry David Thoreau

• If you're lonely when you're alone then you're in bad company.--Jean Paul Sartre

• Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.--Pearl S. Buck

• Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet except the beating of your heart.--Jeanne Marie Laskas

• It is in solitude that the works of hand, heart and mind are always conceived, and in solitude that individuality must be affirmed.--Robert Lindner (Must You Conform?)

• It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking . . . in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.--Franz Kafka

• It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse.--Max Nordau

• Language has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone, and the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.--Paul Johannes Tillich

• Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.--Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

• Like water which can clearly mirror the sky and the trees only so long as its surface is undisturbed, the mind can only reflect the true image of the Self when it is tranquil and wholly relaxed.--Indra Devi

• Man cannot survive without air, water and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.--Thomas Szasz

• One must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.--Meister Eckhart

• Only in quiet waters do thing mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.--Hans Margolius

• Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.--Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)

• The person who has not learned to be happy and content while completely alone for an hour a day, or a week has missed life's greatest serenity.--H. Clay Tate (Building a Better Home Town)

• Solitude can be frightening because it invites us to meet a stranger we think we may not want to know--ourselves.--Melvyn Kinder

• Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.--Abraham Cowley

• Solitude gives birth to the original in us.--Thomas Mann

• Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.--James Russell Lowell

• ...solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition...--Amelia Barr

• Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.--May Sarton

• Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone.--Thomas De Quincey

• There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.--Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (Earthly Paradise)

• To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare.--Kenko Yoshida

• Solitude, if rightly used, becomes not only a privilege but a necessity. Only a superficial soul fears to fraternize with itself.--Alice H. Rice

• Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.--Abraham Joshua Heschel

• Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.--Paul Brunton

• Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.--Hannah Arendt

• Solitude is the place of purification.--Martin Buber (I and Thou, 3)

• Talents are best nurtured in solitude: character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.--Goethe

• There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.--Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.--Omar Khayyam

• True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.--William Penn

• We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.--Philip Gilbert Hamerton (The Intellectual Life)

• We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass--grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...we need silence to be able to touch souls.--Mother Teresa

• What a commentary on our civilization when being alone is considered suspect, when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it-like a secret vice!--Anne Morrow Lindbergh

• What a lovely surprise to discover how unlonely being alone can be.--Ellen Burstyn

• When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness", the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.--Thomas Merton

• When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death--ourselves.--Eda LeShan

• Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.--Barbara De Angelis

• You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.