She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

People think they know you. They think they know how you’re handling a situation. But the truth is no one knows. No one knows what happens after you leave them, when you’re lying in bed or sitting over your breakfast alone and all you want to do is cry or scream. They don’t know what’s going on inside your head — the mind-numbing cocktail of anger and sadness and guilt. This isn’t their fault. They just don’t know. And so they pretend and they say you’re doing great when you’re really not. And this makes everyone feel better. Everybody but you.

It’s the oldest story in the world. One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you’re ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.

Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.

It’s the oldest story in the world. One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you’re ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

But as bad as it was, I learned something about myself. That I could go through something like that and survive. I mean, I know it could have been worse—a lot worse— but for me, it was all I could have handled at the time. And I learned from it.

Grief does not change you, it reveals you.

You either like me or you don’t. It took me twenty-something years to learn how to love myself; I don’t have that kind of time to convince somebody else.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.