Jennifer Pastiloff Quotes

And in the way fate works, the cruel and funny asshole that it can be, my father withheld love from my mom and my mom did whatever she could to get it, a replica of the environment she had growing up.

And then there's this: no matter how many bullshit stories you have or don't have, there are no guarantees in life. Nothing is owed to us. That "not knowing" is scary, but the tools to help us--writing, breathing, yoga, connecting--are all we have. And honestly, sometimes the tools are Netflix and coffee as well as breathing and yoga and writing. But we must have tools.

Stop for a moment and say: Today I feel good. Right now, I feel good. My life is amazing, and I am happy. Right now, in this moment, there is no missing part of me. There is nothing missing.

Sick equaled thin and thin got me noticed. Being noticed made me feel loved.

I think about the wrong turns I've made, which, who's to say if they were wrong or not?

It was as if I finally understood what being present meant. I had heard it so many times in yoga classes but I had never experienced it. It was like a protective film that someone had forgotten to take off was peeled back from my brain, and I could finally see things clearly. How I wasn't truly stuck.

If I could measure my life in moments of self-doubt, it would look like yardstick after yardstick of questioning my choices. From what I order for dinner in a restaurant to whether or not I should have a baby... Choose A. Obsess that I should have chosen B instead of A. Why do I always choose the wrong thing?

At the end of my life, when I say one final What have I done?, let my answer be, I have done love.

It was then that I decided to thank you to my past. Thanks to all the weirdos and inappropriate old men, and also thank you to all the kind people... Thank you to the lady who told me she thought I would have made something of myself by now. Thank you to the people who paid attention. And those who didn't.

I was living in a desert of lack and a city of not-enoughness. I listened to Wayne speak and wondered, What if there really was enough? And what if I am enough? And, oh my god, I have been such an asshole for so long.

There are little beauties everywhere. We just have to look for them. And then when we find them, we have to keep them close, even when they or drift off to sea, and that isn't hard, really, when you think about it, because everything always leads to something else and when you feel sad and empty and like it all means nothing, you might look out and see two shopping carts and you might remember: I just have to look, listen, and tell the truth and the beauty will be there. That's what beauty hunting is.

And so escape and love became intertwined, and from this grew a sense of not knowing, ignoring, pretending not to know... Anything I felt--grief, depression, shock, anger--I simply starved it away or exercised or drank too much wine or slept. I simply would not know. It was something I learned as a child that had somehow carried me into adulthood. Until it would no longer carry me. Until I learned to look deep into the face of whatever it was, and what I found was this: it didn't kill me.

What would I not realize until my forties was that the moon is never missing any of itself. We just can't see it. People are like that, too.

Sure, once I published a piece or once I closed my notebook and left the cafe or stopped daydreaming, I was scared again, but while I was writing, while I was telling the truth, I was unafraid. I wanted that again. Fearless-ish. Afraid and not afraid. Scared and doing it anyway. Holding more than one thing. Two things at once.

Should is an asshole.

While I was still waitressing, I went to see Wayne Dyer speak and he asked the question I've tried to live by: "Who would you be if nobody told you who you were?

Don't wait for the coffee or the eggs or the shmuck in the front row to tell you how it is. You'll wait your whole life and then end up in an embankment with a heart full of sorrow and I could have done it betters.

The way I see it, time is a con artist. The con artist telling you that this isn't a good time, you should wait. The right time will never exist. Like so many of the things we think are perfect and in the end turn out to be just ordinary.