The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

You have to keep walking, no matter what. If you don't, it's a living death. You're just standing in one place dying.

I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it's one thing and one thing only: it's doing what you have to do.

...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.