I decided not to listen to the one out of the one hundred. Sometimes the one is your own IA, sometimes it’s someone else. There will always be the one who doesn’t like you, the one who says, No, you should not do this, Yes, you suck. And we always always have two choices: keep going or shut down.

At the end of my life, when I say one final What have I done?, let my answer be, I have done love.

And so escape and love became intertwined, and from this grew a sense of not knowing, ignoring, pretending not to know... Anything I felt – grief, depression, shock, anger – I simply starved it away or exercised or drank too much wine or slept. I simply would not know. It was something I learned as a child that had somehow carried me into adulthood. Until it would no longer carry me. Until I learned to look deep into the face of whatever it was, and what I found was this: it didn’t kill me.

It was then that I decided to thank you to my past. Thanks to all the weirdos and inappropriate old men, and also thank you to all the kind people... Thank you to the lady who told me she thought I would have made something of myself by now. Thank you to the people who paid attention. And those who didn’t.

Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.

So let your mind be open and go ahead and buy milk at the store, and every once in a while when you feel a pang in your heart or a splurge of oh my god in your bones, please understand it is your life, trying to be remembered.

I think about the wrong turns I’ve made, which, who’s to say if they were wrong or not?

They helped me understand that what lived in my body needed a way out. Writing was the way out, just as yoga had been the way in.

Buy your fear a cup of coffee and show it how it’s done.

It was as if I finally understood what being present meant. I had heard it so many times in yoga classes but I had never experienced it. It was like a protective film that someone had forgotten to take off was peeled back from my brain, and I could finally see things clearly. How I wasn’t truly stuck.