An emotional wound requires the same priority attention as a physical wound.

Can I tell you a secret? You don’t have to be in a relationship. 
 
I mean it. I know they force it down your throat until you choke on it. Girls aren’t pretty unless they’re wanted. Boys aren’t men unless they’re having sex with someone. People aren’t lovable until they’re dating someone. 
 
But a relationship won’t always make you happy, and as wonderful as romance is, it isn’t the only love that exists. I have seen friendships that are deeper and more pure than couples who swear it’s forever – and yet the friendship is the one people ignore. 
 
I have heard so often “nobody loves me” out of the mouths of people who are single. And it kills me because if you ask them: where are your parents, your teachers, your classmates, your pets – they say, yes, okay, but it doesn’t count. Of course it counts, love doesn’t diminish just because someone doesn’t want to have sex with you. In fact, doesn’t it sort of make that love more real that they want nothing – not even a date – out of you?
 
It is pretty to be in love. It’s magical, I’m sure. But it’s also wonderful to stop for ice cream in your prom dress with six other girls. It’s also wonderful to go visit the world with nothing but a bunch of buddies who are really excited about learning. 
 
The problem is: we’ve made everything about “the one”. But maybe “the one” is just you, loving yourself, having fun, and being happy. Maybe instead of looking for our other halves, we should be piecing ourselves together.
 
Maybe I wasn’t born unfinished. Maybe I am the one who makes myself better.

It’s important that you keep your feelings and your self worth in different places because when feelings get hurt it shouldn’t change how you view yourself.

Sometimes life doesn’t give you something you want, not because you don’t deserve it, but because you deserve more.

Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.

Leave your apartment looking terrible. Walk to the deli and see your usual deli guy’s eyes start to widen at your disheveled appearance. This would’ve horrified you yesterday but today it makes you smile. You’ve decided that everything that made you worry will now make you smile.

Walk with better posture. Order two helpings of dessert. Ask someone to take you to a doctor’s appointment and refuse to feel guilty about it. You would do the same for them so why should you feel like you’re putting anyone out? Stand by your opinion that The Shins are a good band even when you’re friends give you hell over it. This is thrilling. Openly loving The Shins has never felt so liberating.

Tell your mother that you love her because you do. Don’t tell anyone that you love them if it’s not true, if they don’t deserve it. It’s a privilege to be loved by you. Your emotional …days are effectively over.

Turn to Nature when people are absent. She has the cure for loneliness. She will welcome you like no one else. She will put you into her cradle and accept you for who you are. Her birds will sing a song for you, her winds will blow away your bad thoughts, and her rushing waters will bring calm to your upset mind.

Traumatized children originally adapted to familial abuse in order to survive within the abusive family system. They believed that only by adapting to their parents’ expectations of them would they remain protected. Maintaining the status quo, even if it was a sick status quo, was for these children better than being abandoned or losing their identity within the family. They protected themselves from the primal fear of abandonment even as they lost contact with their true selves. The abusive family they worked so painfully to stabilize by fitting in provoked them to abandon their authenticity. From the point of view of the children, these adaptations were a matter of life and death. Their utility was sanctioned by the most powerful animal instinct: survival.

Success is a journey, not a destination. The process is often more important than the outcome.