what we actually fear is not having a home within ourselves.

“We think it is the aloneness we fear, but I believe what we actually fear is not having a home within ourselves. For so long, I did not trust my own landscape. I had believed the stories I learned about it, and I had taken every chance to avoid living there and learning her. Sobriety forced a closeness to myself and to life that was at first excruciating. It burned, and it burned, and it burned. But in the ashes from burning all the things I was not, I found her. I found me.

And then I could finally be found by others.”
― Laura McKowen

“...I realized it wasn't in spite of her pain that she was doing these things but because of it. She knew exactly what it took to walk though the fire. That is what I recognized in her. That was why I believed her.”
― Laura McKowen

“This is the 10 percent withholding. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but right then they agreed it was okay to lie to each other - even if only a little...But they were always operating just left of center, hovering around the truth of who they were, unwilling to life the film from their eyes.

It was a lot safer this way, but it was also extraordinarily lonely...

It would have been a risk to call him out on the little fudging of the truth...she would have had to withstand a moment of discomfort...it might have allowed then to actually fins an honest ground zero from which to build something.”
― Laura McKowen

“...much the same way as I feel about becoming a mother: it has brought me right up to the nose of life itself and forced me to look it straight in the face. At first, the nearness was too much; there was nothing to protect me from the immediacy of things - not from the bright lights or the sharp pain. But then, eventually, I came to realize that this is what it means to be alive - to not look away from any of it - and that all I was really doing before was pretending: floating through my days half-numb, half involved, half-awake, thinking I was really living when in fact I was missing it all.”
― Laura McKowen

“Lying and withholding is the cheapest, easiest way to control others. You control their perception, control their response to you, control who you need them to be, In telling the truth, I was surrendering control with the hope that it would lead to something different. I hoped it would lead to something real.”
― Laura McKowen

“It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to take everything you have. It’s supposed to take longer than you want and to change you, completely. This often won’t feel good when it’s happening, but nothing worth having ever does.”
― Laura McKowen

“It is counterintuitive that restriction might offer expansiveness.”
― Laura McKowen

“Maybe it’s helpful to linger there for a minute, in the terrible and the necessary. To start to see them as the same. Maybe in this way, pain is not such a problem.”
― Laura McKowen