How to Fail

For so long, we woman have turned our anger inwards, redirecting it towards ourselves and allowing it to manifest as shame. We have told ourselves, instead, that we are sad or hormonal or stressed, but these have been placeholder emotions. And for so long we have been encouraged to do this by a misogynistic culture that realises female anger is dangerous not because it is the product of mental imbalance but because it is fuel. Female anger is power.

The danger of the mind to trick one into thinking all the bad things we imagine are facts when in truth, they are just thoughts which are, in turn, a product of our experience. We exist separately from our thoughts.

Living your life according to what everyone else might think of you is to cede control of who you are. It is to outsource your identity to a bunch of strangers who do not know you.

That there is no one on this big, wide planet who can understand the you-ness of you more than you.

Life crises have a way of doing that: they strip you of your old certainties and throw you into chaos. The only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking, into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.

As I’ve grown to understand myself better, I’ve also grown to know which are the friends I can truly rely on in times of crisis and who want the best for me

Being honest and publicly vulnerable is not the only way to be, but it's certainly a brave and deeply humane way to be.

If you can remove your ego from a process, then there really isn't any difference between success and failure. They're just both parts of a process. And that you shouldn't look at a failure as something terrible, it just is what it is and you shouldn't look at success as something great, it just is what it is.

Adventures do by definition involve risk, but not having an adventure means missing out on life, a far greater risk.

People you considered the closest, most loyal, most intimate allies, will drift away from you and quite often, you won’t know why.

you know that no matter how many months have passed since the last occasion you met in person, real friendship should exist in an alternative space–time continuum which can be tapped into whenever necessary without any judgement being placed on either party.

A friend has not made a commitment, has not signed a contract or walked down the aisle and promised to love you until death do you part. A friend does not need to do anything or be anyone in order to make you feel better about yourself. Of course, the greatest friends do this anyway, but it is not their job and you should not expect it of them.

It's almost as if - in being childfree yourself - you become everybody else's child: someone who needs taking care of, who needs guiding in the right direction, who doesn't quite understand, but bless her she's trying

Like many young women, I mistakenly thought that the best way of feeling better about myself was to get other people to like me and to attempt to survive on the fumes of their approbation

Our failure as children (and it is an understandable one) is to imagine our parents exist only for us, when actually they have whole interior and exterior lives that do not permanently rotate around whether or not we want fish-fingers or cheese toasties for supper.