Be gentle with yourself...

“When it comes to being gentle, start with yourself. Don’t get upset with your imperfections. Being disappointed by failure is understandable, but it shouldn’t turn into bitterness or spite directed at yourself. It’s a great mistake——because it leads nowhere—to get angry because you are angry, upset at being upset, disappointed because you are disappointed.”
--St. Frances de Sales

Unprecedented

“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
--John Green, from THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”
--poem by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott