A Quote by India Arie

Saying things on paper that I would never, ever say, and saying things to myself, admitting things to myself, about myself and my personality, just putting it on paper, is how I deal with emotional pain.
I started dealing with my emotional pain by writing. I always had been a writer, but just not songs. Saying things on paper that I would never, ever say, and saying things to myself, admitting things to myself, about myself and my personality, just putting it on paper, is how I deal with emotional pain.
When I'm tired, I tell myself what the people are saying about me. In that second workout when I'm saying, 'Man, I don't want to do this.' I remind myself, 'They're saying you're old. They're saying you're 33. They're saying you can't do it this year.' I play games with myself off that stuff.
In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."
I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books.
I'm very smart with my paper! I stopped buying things for myself a long time ago - now I just buy things for my kids or my wife.
I have never been insecure, ever, about how I look, about what I want to do with myself. My mum told me to only ever do things for myself, not for others.
I still think of myself as a newspaper guy and you live by deadlines in the newspaper world, so, they don't really give you any excuses. At the paper they never say, "Well, we just won't have Tuesday's paper come out, we'll just bring Tuesday's paper out on Wednesday, so go ahead, take all the time you need." They come out with that paper regardless.
Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn't know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can't do myself, my graduate students should be doing.
Two things were falling apart, my personal life, my professional life. And I realized that all those things were supposed to make me happy, but nothing could fill me up except myself. So I went into analysis. I went to see a doctor, to talk about my lack of self-esteem. I don't know how to say it better: my lack of self-esteem, my insecurity, and how these things were not going to fill me up. And I'd better fix myself and then find out what I liked. For me, therapy was the greatest gift I could ever give myself. There's nothing I could have done for myself that would've been better.
My list of things I never pictured myself saying when I pictured myself as a parent has grown over the years.
Bullies say the things they say because they're unhappy. I also remind myself that what they are saying is not really about me.
I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain.
I don't hide anything about myself, so I don't find it difficult to talk about things that happen in my life... But at the same time, I don't like putting myself out there too much. That's how I am.
I was never appalled by myself. I felt a little bit uneasy about certain things. But honestly I've learned to love myself and to see that in the midst of all my ambition and desire to succeed and my search for approval, I do give things to people. I bring some sort of happiness to their lives. So I'm not so hard on myself anymore.
Eating is not one of the things that I do now to deal with pain, because I don't ever want to do that. But I isolate myself, that's what I do.
With a goose-quill and a few sheets of paper, I mock myself of the universe. They say I am the son of a courtesan; it may be so, but I have the heart of a King. I live free, I enjoy myself, I can call myself happy.
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