“In some ways, coming to terms with myself and working toward recovery has been like saying I love you to someone but keeping a loaded gun hidden in your back pocket, just in case that person pisses...”

“DBT's catchphrase of developing a life worth living means you're not just surviving; rather, you have good reasons for living. I'm also getting better at keeping another dialectic in mind: On the o...”

“I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.”

“Thirty seconds of pure awareness is a long time, especially after a lifetime of escaping yourself at all costs.”

“But what if you simply don't have a solid self to return toif the way you are is seen as basically broken? And what if you can't conceive of "normal" or "healthy" because pain and loneliness are al...”

“Yet I also recognize this: Even if everyone in the world were to accept me and my illness and validate my pain, unless I can abide myself and be compassionate toward my own distress, I will probabl...”

“Even as a child the glimpse of what a normal life would have been was always beyond my vision and my grasp. No matter what I glimpsed - whether hope or warning, happiness or sadness - it all led to...”

“Tempting as it may be to draw one conclusion or another from my story and universalize it to apply to another's experience, it is not my intention for my book to be seen as some sort of cookie-cutt...”

“I couldnt trust my own emotions. Which emotional reactions were justified, if any? And which ones were tainted by the mental illness of BPD? I found myself fiercely guarding and limiting my emotion...”

“Inspirational quotes are only making you more miserable.”

“It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary”

“The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy.”

“[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the originalone emotion that time could never fade, and t...”

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, bu...”

“I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution ...”