Wednesday, March 01, 2023

One stranger who understands your experience exactly will do for you what hundreds of close friends and family who don't understand cannot. It is the necessary palliative for the pain or stretching into change. It is the cool glass of water in hell. Laura McKowen

“The truest story - the one that will always be truest - is that I am a human being, being human. Sometimes, I am my best self. Sometimes, not so much. But goddamn, I am trying to do better. I am always trying to do better. My guess is that you are, too.”
Laura McKowen

“This is the singular, hard truth I come up against every day: I am the only one responsible for my experience.”
Laura McKowen
“People who stay sick choose to keep blaming. They stand firmly in their anger and resentment and call it a revolution. They bristle against this kind of work because they view it as an affront to their sovereignty. They don’t see that humility is not an admission of weakness but a result of knowing exactly how powerful you are. It’s much easier to go down the path of self-righteousness, to be sure. Nothing is more gratifying. I fall into it regularly. But those who choose the other way? They get better. They get free. They soar, with soft dignity. They rise, without needing to announce it.”
Laura McKowen

“1. It is not your fault.
2. It is your responsibility.
3. It is unfair that this is your thing.
4. This is your thing.
5. This will never stop being your thing until you face it.
6. You cannot do it alone.
7. Only you can do it.
8. I love you.
9. I will never stop reminding you of these things.”
Laura McKowen

“The same is true for all of us when it comes to our things. We have to pick a side. If we ever want out of purgatory, we have to decide if we are going back to a life of denial and secrecy and hiding and gripping onto the thing we do not know how to live without, or if we are going to take a stab at doing a thing we have never done before.”
Laura McKowen

“Forget forever. It doesn't exist, anyway. As Eckhart Tolle also said, "It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living," and that's exactly what you're doing when now is swallowed by projections of forever. Nothing in the future exists yet. But anything is possible right now. Including the thing you think you cannot do.”
Laura McKowen

“One stranger who understands your experience exactly will do for you what hundreds of close friends and family who don't understand cannot. It is the necessary palliative for the pain or stretching into change. It is the cool glass of water in hell.”
Laura McKowen

“if you truly want to live with peace in your heart and be free of the burdens of the past — you must be brave enough to be willing to look at yourself honestly, clearly, and without reservation. You must take responsibility for everything that’s ever happened to you. Not blame. Responsibility.”
Laura McKowen

“This is the singular, hard truth I come up against every day: I am the only one responsible for my experience. I decide what I let in; I decide who I let in; I decide how to perceive things; I choose it all.”
Laura McKowen

“My drinking — and whatever it is you do to feel better — was born of a natural impulse to soothe, to connect, to feel love. And although alcohol hadn’t actually delivered those things, it was absolutely yoked to them in my mind. In my heart and body, too. It was just what I knew.”
Laura McKowen

“Over time, and with each right choice, I got stronger. I started to feel something magical growing inside me, getting bigger, more substantial, and pulsing with life.
Something like dignity.”
Laura McKowen

“The typical question is, Is this bad enough for me to have to change?

The question we should be asking is, Is this good enough for me to stay the same?

And the real question underneath it all is, Am I free?”
Laura McKowen

“The process has been the gift.”
Laura McKowen

“The place where we pretend, in big ways and in small, that we are something or someone we know in our bones we are not. We can go a long time pretending and thinking we’re doing it right this way, building big, complicated lives on a false foundation. No matter how big and impressive a life you build there, on that island, the crumbling of that life is inevitable.”
Laura McKowen

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