Illness is a story told in the past tense.

Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don't.

Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.

The baby was warm against my chest. I knew I was broken too. I wasn't like other people. I was scared and weird and anxious and sad lots of the time, and I didn't know why. My parents thought I was abnormal, I was pretty sure. They said I wasn't, but you don't get sent to a therapist if you're normal.

Sometimes we really aren't supposed to be the way we are. It's not good for us. And people don't like it. You've got to change. You've got to try harder and do deep breathing and maybe one day take pills and learn tricks so you can pretend to be more like other people. Normal people. But maybe Vanessa was right, and all those other people were broken too in their own ways. Maybe we all spent too much time pretending we weren't.