"How painful is that voice inside your head that shames, blames and belittles you? How many years have you longed to end the struggle and take back your sweet life? The truth is that change is absolutely possible - for you, not just for your friends or people you hear about. For you. No feeling or situation is unworkable. Not heartbreak, not grief, not sadness, not loneliness, not anger. Anything can be felt, sensed, worked through. By inquiring into feelings and beliefs, you can look into and see what is really beneath those compulsions. One taste of this direct knowing and nothing can ever be the same."

"…because now society’s collective mind has been reprogrammed to think that people that suffer from chronic illness or disability, their narrative story should follow that of a 1980’s sports movie montage, wherein you receive your diagnosis, you go through a brief period of depression, you have some inspiring conversations with friends and family, and then you cowboy up. You write that novel, you go to college and get your advanced degree, you run a marathon. Whatever it is, there is a definite thread that you are expected to follow because we see so many of these inspiring, overcoming-at-all-odds stories, when in fact they are extra-ordinary achievements. They are not the normal, and should not be used as a baseline to judge all chronically ill people against. It’s completely unfair and unrealistic. For so many people that suffer from things like fibromyalgia, and chron’s, and ulcerative colitis, their Rocky Balboa moment for the day might be finding the strength to just take a shower, to stand in their own kitchen and fix themselves something to eat before they have to crawl back to bed because just that much effort is too painful or too exhausting for them. And yet our society looks down on those people now, we judge them as somehow lacking because they’re not rising up to achieve all these great things. We have completely unrealistic expectations of them thanks to too many inspiring stories. So now we look at them and judge them as somehow inferior, somehow weaker. They don’t want it enough.They’re not trying hard enough to just be better."

• Academic me: you have so much to do you have a test and ten things due tomorrow you must snap out of it and do your fucking schoolwork
• Anxiety me: I know I know I have to I must what should I do I just can't I want to cry I want to sleep I want to hide
• Depression me: this is too much why are we all still fucking here