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All Highlights

You become anxious when anticipating social situations because you feel you cannot just show up as you are, so you will have to perform.
—Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think. Highlighted
We expect others to be honest and open with their intentions, especially romantically, but how many people are we keeping on the back burner?
When was the last time you leapt out of your comfort zone to tell someone you care about them? When was the last time you definitively asked someone on a date?
We don’t allow others to be messy, but we expect them to lend a comforting shoulder when we’re in pieces.
You’re not going to be ready for the love of your life when they show up. … And if you deny yourself that relationship because you think you need to do more work beforehand, you’re denying yourself the best growing tool there is.
Do you assume other people are doing you a favor by giving you love and spending time with you? Do you ever think about the fact that they likely are just as hungry for love?
Fake kindness isn’t worth it. It makes the world worse.
The synopses we spend so much time writing are for characters we no longer are. … You cannot always make sense of your coexisting truths.
When you see somebody else displaying one of these traits, it’s infuriating, not because you inherently dislike it, but because you have to fight your desire to fully integrate it into your whole consciousness. … The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.
The root of the work of being human is learning how to think.
We can’t choose whose wreckage can [change the parts of ourselves and our worlds we can’t]. We all start as strangers, but we forget that we rarely choose who ends up a stranger, too.
We find people irrationally compelling. We find souls made of the same stuff ours are.

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