“That critical, hesitant voice you sometimes hear, the one that bellows from a deep familiar place inside you? It might not be your actual voice. It might not even belong to you.”

“When I meet my needs, I can show up in relationships with clarity, steadiness, and choice. I can choose the kinds of relationships that help me feel seen and safe—instead of trying to mold myself into ones that don’t suit me.”

“The essays you’ve written, the poems you’ve tucked away, the notebooks you’ve kept—these acts are not waiting rooms for success. They are the success. The act of making is what nourishes you. The rest is noise.”

“When we commemorate, we aren’t capturing our accomplishments and putting them behind glass; we’re relating to our own capabilities. We’re gathering ourselves together in a kind of kinship, acknowledging: yes, this happened, and I did good work, and that matters to me.”

“For a long time, I struggled to describe what I do—especially in the context of small talk, where nuance gets flattened. But if you asked me right now what I do, I’d simply say: I help people with their creativity.”

“The more my self-belief depends on an external, inflexible circumstance, the more anxiously I remain attached to it.”

“It is in direct relationship where you will build your most reliable self-trust, where things that are hard to believe will slowly start to feel less pretend and more apparent.”

“Discipline: the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience. From Middle English, carrying the sense of mortification by scourging oneself.

Um, is this what we really want to be?”