All I Know Now: Wonderings and Reflections on Growing Up Gracefully

One of the things that strikes me most though is how some people don't realise they're self-harming. The phrase 'self-harm' brings up thoughts of 'cutting', but that's only a small portion of it. When you drink excessively to drown your sorrows to the point you throw up and can't see straight and/or, like a girl at my school, ended up being driven to hospital to have her stomach pumped, you've brought harm to yourself. If you take drugs to feel numb and it becomes an addiction that you can't break, you've self-harmed. When you starve yourself or binge eat to fit the latest fashions, you're pushing your body further than it can go. We need to start treating ourselves how we deserve to be treated, even if you feel that no one else does. Prove to the world you ARE worth something by treating yourself with the utmost respect and hope that other people will follow your example. And even if they don't, at least one person in the world is treating you well: YOU.

Embrace the wrongness because it'll make the eventual rightness even sweeter

This book is for those who said I'd never get anywhere in life and those who never doubted for a second that I would. Without either of you, I wouldn't be here. Thank you.

Everyone is on a journey at any given moment in their lives

People are people. Ever changing, complicated and wonderfully layered.

Love has always fascinated me. [...] And gosh, I've never known something to be so gleefully wonderful and soul-crushingly exhausting before.

Pursuing dreams can be daunting. It feels like you're standing on the edge of a cliff staring at your dream as it sits on a cloud, floating out in the open air, and all you need to do is take that leap to see if you'll fall or if you'll fly.

You'll be able to find the strength to love someone just that much again once you've recovered from the heartbreak

Things haven't always been this bad, therefore they won't always be this bad.

By the end of our lives, we're covered in battle scars and shrapnel.

A life lived in fear is a life half lived.

We welcome that kind of shrapnel so that when it twinges in our souls we're filled with that glowing feeling that comfort us in our darkest hours and whispers from somewhere inside that our own happiness isn't impossible nor is it entirely lost.