You are not the person you were five years ago. You evolve as your self-image does, so make sure that it’s an accurate one. Give yourself credit for … - Brianna Wiest

Your identity does not have to be cohesive. Your story doesn’t have to flow. You don’t have to be neatly packaged in a way that other people understand. You have to stop living for your synopsis, the summary we try to piece together in our minds when we imagine people explaining us or evaluating who we are. It doesn’t have to make sense. You’re allowed to be great at a lot of things that don’t necessarily relate to one another. You’re not limited to just one purpose, one talent, one love. You can have a variety of jobs, each of them meaningful at the time you have them. You can be good at a lot of things without lacking in others. You do not have to be a novel; you can be a book of stories.

The ways in which your current situation — though perhaps unplanned or unwanted — could be the path to the place you’ve actually always wanted to be, if only you’d begin to think of it that way.

The path forward is understanding that we are sometimes collateral damage to people’s own inner wars, and that we do not need to adopt their weapons as our own in order to fight back.