Of course he freaked me out. Of course it's nothing to do with me. But none of that matters. He loved me and now he doesn't. I was everything to him and now I am nothing.

You can have this kind of love. You can have it. You just grab it. Of course the problem with having that love is that you can lose it, too.

In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.

This boy has negative charisma. He walks into a room and the oxygen starts to evaporate. I guess that's why girls sleep with him. They find his awfulness transfixing. He's like a lousy 1970's disaster movie that they can't bring themselves to turn off, even though it is making their life worse every minute they leave it on.

What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.

There is that doll dress-up quality of adorable teenage girl writer, and I never felt either as adorable as I was supposed to be, or as dark as the rumors, you know, "She must have slept with the editor," and I was like, "Oh my god, I'm still a virgin." It was very strange.

There is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.