When we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. We are raising kids with commodified views of sex, lack of real connection, filter… - Glennon Doyle

Depression and anxiety are not feelings. Feelings return me to myself. Depression and anxiety are body snatchers that suck me out of myself so that I appear to be there but I'm really gone. Other people can still see me, but no one can feel me anymore — including me. For me, the tragedy of mental illness is not that I'm sad but that I'm not anything. Mental illness makes me miss my own life.

This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only one self. Dividing into two selves — the shown self and the hidden self — that is brokenness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and I let the world adjust.
I will never promise to be this way or that way, I will only promise to show up, as I am, wherever I am. That's it, and that's all. People will like me or not, but being liked is not my One Thing; integrity is. So I must live and tell my truth. Folks will come around or quit coming around. Either way: lovely. Anything or anyone I could lose by telling the truth was never mine anyway. I'm willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.

I will not stay, not ever again — in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself. When my body tells me the truth, I'll believe it. I trust myself now, so I will no longer suffer voluntarily or silently or for long.