We're all kind of on a break together now. Some of my friends are so productive during Covid, and I admire them for using this time. I am not. I've been really struggling with mental health. Bipolar, like a lot of mental illnesses, is triggered by stress, so it always flares up at the least convenient times. I feel like all my coping mechanisms are not available to me. Sex. Bars. Dancing. I'm the sort of manic-depressive who craves company. When I'm feeling sick, I drag my body out into the world and put it in spaces with other people who will get me drunk, take care of me, etc.

"When the present moment is intolerable, Mae, we contort ourselves into pretzels to get away from it. But the question I would encourage you to ask is not, 'Why did I use?' We all know why we use. Pain relief. Instead ask yourself, 'Why the pain?'"

- Feel Good, episode 6

Burr's credo was to wait--for the moment, the opened door, the invitation.  In Hamilton, Burr spends years waiting for a chair to be offered at the table in the room 'where it happens.' Patience and timing will play a part in your ultimate success for sure.  But I found the happiness and the consistency I wanted for so long at the exact moment I decided to build my own table and my own chairs.

Leslie Odom Jr.

Sarah remembered sitting in this gazebo with Julietta and Pammie and Greg Veltin, those three linked in a circle of joy to which Sarah could not stay attached though they'd reached out their hands to keep her. Theirs was a love she had rejected by reflex because of its very simplicity, its undiverted, untranslated eruption from the heart or the guts or wherever such feelings came from.

Trust Exercise, Susan Choi

... This adored, handsome, senior who can dance like Astaire and who is so clearly, inevitably, no-other-possibility gay that Sarah cannot believe she never realized--but that was fifteen in a nutshell, she'll think when she's twice, and then three times, that age.  The obvious and the oblivious sharing the same mental space.

Trust Exercise, Susan Choi

"Are you excited to be having a baby?"

"I don't know... I felt like I had to have one.”

"You felt that you had to have one?  Or you thought that you had to have one? Thoughts are often false.  A feeling's always real.  Not true, just real."

Pipe: “How can a 9-year-old choreograph a dance?” Squeeze: “No one’s told her she can’t yet.” 

"If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that gried revealed."

- Sally Rooney, Normal People

"...somehow it was impossible to move either forward or backward, only downward, onto the floor, until his body was arranged motionless on the carpet. Well, here I am on the floor, he thought. Is life so much worse here than it would be on the bed, or even in a totally different location? No, life is exactly the same. Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head."

- Sally Rooney, Normal People

In accepting his award, De Shields shared his three cardinal rules for longevity: One, surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you coming. Two, slowly is the fastest way to get where you want to be. And three, the top of one mountain is the bottom of the next, so keep climbing, he said

Andre De Shields via The LA Times

I think sometimes when things are really difficult for people, if you're just there with them, if you just walk beside them, it makes all the difference in the world. So much of life can be lonely, but if you know someone is nearby it changes everything.  I think we have understandings that go beyond words all the time.

Lynne Cox via The Spark File, episode 20

Sometimes it's the process of doing that makes things clear.  If we don't start, we never know what could have been.  Sometimes the answers we find while searching are better or more creative than anything we could have imagined before

Lynne Cox via The Spark File, episode 20

Life is so subtle sometimes that you barely notice yourself walking through the doors you once prayed would open.

via Veronica Perretti

Jenny Slate, Little Weirds