What was it like to be so confident even in your failings that you weren't the least bit bothered when other people pointed them out? I was almost envious.

Believe in yourself up here and it will make you stronger than you could ever imagine.

for once, you believed in yourself. you believed you were beautiful and so did the rest of the world.

Sometimes it seems safer to hold it all in, where the only person who can judge is yourself.

It was so quiet, I could hear my own breathing, loud in my ears. Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything any neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.

It was like discovering that some part of you wasn't yours at all. And it made me wonder what else I couldn't claim.