Sanity Break Quotes

While retreating timely into a break of reflection, we can conquer the sanity of our mental condition and find a piece of stillness in the flurry of the world. (“Finally unbend.”)

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no set rules in life. You do what you have to do to survive. If that means running away from the love of your life to preserve your sanity, you do it. If it means breaking someone’s heart so yours doesn’t break; do it. Life is complicated — too much so for there to be absolutes. We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you’ll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves. Olivia has stopped rattling quite as much as she used to. Love is a God-given tool, she tells me. It screws things back in place that were loose, and it cleans out all the broken pieces that you don’t need anymore. I believe her. Our love has been fixing each other. I hope to only hear a tiny jingle when I shake her in a few years

But breaking was beautiful. It hurt, and it was an uphill climb back to sanity, but you came back stronger, fiercer, and more solid than you were before. Tate had obviously been through it, I had, and eventually so would K.C., I thought.

There is... this rage." she said "This despair and hatred and rage that lives and breathes inside me. There's not sanity to it, no gentleness. It is a monster dwelling under my skin. For the past ten years, I have worked every day, every hour, to keep that monster locked up. And the moment I talk about those two days, and what happened before and after, that monster is going to break loose, and there will be no accounting for what I do." "That is how I was able to stand before the King of Adarlan, how I was able to befriend his son and his captain, how I was able to live in that palace. Because I did not give that rage, those memories, one inch. And right now I am looking for the tools that might destroy my enemy, and I cannot let out the monster, because it will make me use those tools against the king, not put them back as I should—and I might very well destroy the world for spite. So that is why I must be Celaena, not Aelin—because being Aelin means facing those things, unleashing that monster. Do you understand?

But breaking was beautiful. It hurt, and it was an uphill climb back to sanity, but you came back stronger, fiercer, and more solid than you were before.

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no set rules in life. You do what you have to do to survive. If that means running away from the love of your life to preserve your sanity, you do it. If it means breaking someone’s heart so yours doesn’t break; do it. Life is complicated — too much so for there to be absolutes. We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you’ll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves.

Gaslighting is a subtle form of emotional manipulation that often results in the recipient doubting their own perception of reality and their sanity. In addition, gaslighting is a method of manipulation by toxic people to gain power over you. The worst part about gaslighting is that it undermines your self-worth to the point where you’re second-guessing everything.

The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.

don’t work yourself to the point of a mental breakdown. give priority to your mental health. you are only a few steps away from completely losing your balance and breaking your mind. take one step back every time you take two steps forward. breathe. be mindful. see through life as it transpires moment by moment. learn when to rest. sleep is important. eating healthily is important. everything you do for the sake of your sanity is important. being kind to your mind is the best self-care there is. if there’s anything that’s lovely about you, it is your mind.

He'd sacrifice even his sanity for her. If it came down to it, he'd let her break his heart. Because he loved her.

So you're, like crazy, in love. You open your eyes in the morning and your first thought is her. You wonder how she is. What she's doing. When you can see her again. Those thoughts stay with you all day. You share them with whoever will listen — including your best friends, who of course respect you but, after a while, out of the kind of concern only real friends have, seriously question your sanity. And you make all sorts of plans — big plans, like, post-high school — when the rest of us can barely wrap our heads around the fact that we only two years left to get a clue. You live and breath this girl. You talk about her all the time, you hang out with your friends less and less, you're blind to other girls, no matter how hot or into you they are — and some of them are extremely hot and into you — and eventually, you break and actually say you love her. Not only that, you tell your friends you love her. Which, as you know, is about as major as you can get. Your friends may think you're a little out there, but they know you wouldn't be for any other girl. It's just because it's her. She's different. This girl is it for you. Food, water, oxygen, sleep — all details.

I’d actually questioned my sanity, wondered if this was it: the substandard past few years had finally led to a mental break with reality, and now, floodgates open, there’d be no limit to the fiends I’d encounter. They’d simply crawl out of my head, down into the world.

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus. The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities." Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perception of basic orgonotic functioning by means of rigid armoring; in the schizophrenic, on the other hand, the armoring practically breaks down and thus the biosystem is flooded with deep experiences from the biophysical core with which it cannot cope." The "deep experiences" to which Reich refers are the pleasurable streaming sensations associated with intense excitation that is mainly sexual in nature. The schizophrenic cannot cope with these sensations because his body is too contracted to tolerate the charge. Unable to "block" the excitation or reduce it as a neurotic can, and unable to "stand" the charge, the schizophrenic is literally "driven crazy." But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, "homo normalis," having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being "well adjusted," he sees the alternative as "crazy." And in a sense he is right. Without going "crazy," without becoming "mad," so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.

I can't get his bones to go down the fucking drain. I try to stuff the tiny holes, too tiny for this pain. I can't get his bones to break any way for my gain. Break them back a little too far, never too far for the sake of sane.

It is this clash between desire and fear that causes anger, which is the great destroyer of sanity in life. When pain is accepted for what it is, a lesson and a warning, and deeply looked into and heeded, the separation between pain and pleasure breaks down, and both become experience - painful when resisted, joyful when accepted.

World in Peril (The Sonnet) The world is in peril and security is out of the window. If now we don't be humans, what's the point of us! Humankind is in turmoil and anxiety is running amok. If now we don’t be responsible what's the point of us! Neighborhoods are wailing in fear and desperation. If now we don’t lend a hand what's the point of us! Communities are struggling in crippling uncertainty. If now we don't break narrowness what's the point of us! Nations are panting to sustain health and sanity. If now we don't rush to rescue what's the point of us! Nature is revolting to reclaim her kingdom. If now we don't make peace with her what's the point of us! Now is not the time for theorizing and criticizing. Forgetting argumentation we must stand as one people unbending.

Taking a break from digging into your own issues doesn't make you unauthentic. It makes you sane.

Because I’m selfish. I want to defile her. I want to use her to gain my sanity. I want her body, her mind, her heart, and I’ll be damned to hell, but I want her fucking soul.

One who provokes a person by speaking has only called to the surface the passion that was already there. The person who becomes disturbed is like a rotten loaf of bread, which looks all right outside, but inside is mouldy, so that if anyone breaks it its rottenness appears. —Dorotheos

Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. At first alienists described this condition as “moral insanity” and those who exhibited the disorder as “moral imbeciles.” They later adopted the term “psychopath,” used in the lay press as early as 1885 in William Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette, which described it as a “new malady” and stated, “Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.” Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.

Lal Wyburd would naturally have interpreted as selfishness every floundering attempt anybody made to break out of the straitjacket and recover a sanity which must have been theirs in the beginning, and might be theirs again in the end. That left the long stretch of the responsible years, when you were lunging in your madness after love, money, position, possessions, while an inkling persisted, sometimes even a certainty descended: of a calm in which the self had been stripped, if painfully, of its human imperfections.

In a world so unwell, few people are sane, and even while in hell, they don't fight in vain.

Grief breaks down all but the crazy; it's a secret of your profession, one people don't want to know.

After his break with Freud, Jung pursued the connection between the unconscious and the occult and found example after example of ancient mystical and occult symbols in the dreams of people who had never encountered those symbols in waking life. He came to believe that below the repressed memories of individual life, there exists a collective unconscious full of archaic images that appear in myths, legends, and the traditions of occultism. By bringing those images into consciousness, it is possible to achieve individuation: a state of psychological balance and wholeness as far above ordinary sanity as neurotic conditions are below it.

Consider a narrow deep river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a long distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, when one gets within a few miles of the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is highest, as you then get closer to the dam the concern falls off to zero! That is, the people living immediately under the dam who are certain to be drowned in a dam burst profess unconcern. That is because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while living immediately under the high dam is to deny the finite possibility that it could burst.

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls--as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows back enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all ,may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor beings to reassert itself.

in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.” People exhibiting this purest form of the disorder would become known, in the jargon of psychiatry, as “Cleckley” psychopaths.

Darkness I find myself set upon a ship of fools and cast adrift. Adrift in sea of madness, steaming towards a storm of uncertainty. Overboard, swirling, twirling tumbling. Engulfed in madness. Shipwrecked, marooned. Washed upon a rock of hope. Darkness surrounds. Within the darkness madness laps upon a distant shore. Morning breaks and sun rises once more. Darkness retreats into the shadows. Golden rays of light cleanse the mind and soul. A new day dawns heralding sanity, and hope for the human race once more.

We have to break this cycle, back up, regroup, and bring some sanity to our lives so we’ll have the perspective, energy, and compassion for the people we see each day, and especially those who live under the same roof with us. Then we can love them like we love ourselves.

When he wrote back, he pretended to be his old self, he lied his way into sanity. For fear of his psychiatrist who was also their censor, they could never be sensual, or even emotional. His was considered a modern, enlightened prison, despite its Victorian chill. He had been diagnosed, with clinical precision, as morbidly oversexed, and in need of help as well as correction. He was not to be stimulated. Some letters—both his and hers—were confiscated for some timid expression of affection. So they wrote about literature, and used characters as codes. All those books, those happy or tragic couples they had never met to discuss! Tristan and Isolde the Duke Orsino and Olivia (and Malvolio too), Troilus and Criseyde, Once, in despair, he referred to Prometheus, chained to a rock, his liver devoured daily by a vulture. Sometimes she was patient Griselde. Mention of “a quiet corner in a library” was a code for sexual ecstasy. They charted the daily round too, in boring, loving detail. He described the prison routine in every aspect, but he never told her of its stupidity. That was plain enough. He never told her that he feared he might go under. That too was clear. She never wrote that she loved him, though she would have if she thought it would get through. But he knew it. She told him she had cut herself off from her family. She would never speak to her parents, brother or sister again. He followed closely all her steps along the way toward her nurse’s qualification. When she wrote, “I went to the library today to get the anatomy book I told you about. I found a quiet corner and pretended to read,” he knew she was feeding on the same memories that consumed him “They sat down, looked at each other, smiled and looked away. Robbie and Cecilia had been making love for years—by post. In their coded exchanges they had drawn close, but how artificial that closeness seemed now as they embarked on their small talk, their helpless catechism of polite query and response. As the distance opened up between them, they understood how far they had run ahead of themselves in their letters. This moment had been imagined and desired for too long, and could not measure up. He had been out of the world, and lacked the confidence to step back and reach for the larger thought. I love you, and you saved my life. He asked about her lodgings. She told him. “And do you get along all right with your landlady?” He could think of nothing better, and feared the silence that might come down, and the awkwardness that would be a prelude to her telling him that it had been nice to meet up again. Now she must be getting back to work. Everything they had, rested on a few minutes in a library years ago. Was it too frail? She could easily slip back into being a kind of sister. Was she disappointed? He had lost weight. He had shrunk in every sense. Prison made him despise himself, while she looked as adorable as he remembered her, especially in a nurse’s uniform. But she was miserably nervous too, incapable of stepping around the inanities. Instead, she was trying to be lighthearted about her landlady’s temper. After a few more such exchanges, she really was looking at the little watch that hung above her left breast, and telling him that her lunch break would soon be over.

When every link to the outside world is severed, time has no meaning. It ceases to exist other than as a dull memory, a vague recollection of what a minute used to be, an hour, a day. Sealed up tight so far beneath the ground, every single second was stretched out almost to infinity—each one a vast and empty abyss where time used to reign, an ageless aeon barren of significance and consequence. When every scrap of light and sound has been taken away, reality has no meaning. It too ceases to exist, for what is reality other than the cumulation of senses—images witnessed by our own eyes and the noises that enter through our ears? But when all those senses are starved, then the real world fades away like the last frantic gasp of a television program when the set is switched off. And when reality goes, sanity has no reason. How can your ability to behave in a normal and rational way still exist when nothing normal or rational remains? As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we are separated from the physical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare.

In the domain of primitive spirituality, that is, supernatural spirituality, the mind loses all its sanity in the name of non-conformity and takes nonsense to be a form of higher sense and supernatural insanity and fallacy to be spiritual sanity and truth. In an attempt to break free from the chains of religious orthodoxy as well as radical rationalism, these mysticism-obsessed beings, who pompously prefer to call themselves "lightworkers", "yogis", “mystics” and so on, end up bound in yet another form of orthodoxy or extremism, replete with the primal psychological germs of supernaturalism.

It seems like everyone these days is putting on a mask to feel beautiful, trying to fit into some pre-established norms of how we should look. This isn’t only painful, it’s ignorant. Saying like we know, better than nature does, what is beautiful and what is not is like a two-year-old lecturing an old man about patience. Nature’s been creating beauty for millennia and you are part of that creation process. Stop the madness. Stop fighting who you are. Let the mask fall. It’ll be strange at first, yes. But, over time, you’ll see beyond the temporary discomfort of stepping outside social norms and learn to see the beauty you were born with, the beauty you’ve been taught to ignore and cover up. You’ll see beauty that will take your breath away, like a sunset. That’s how beautiful you are—like a sunset, like a forest, like a million fireflies on a calm warm night lighting up the sky. You are made by nature. Nature is wiser in the ways of beauty than cosmetics companies or magazines. Break the spell. Gain back your sanity. Go find that brilliant beauty within every single part of you. Go find the universe in your eyes. Remove that cloak that’s been pulled over your eyes and see yourself for who you really are.

[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive!

Things I've Learned in 18 Years of Life   1) True love is not something found, rather [sic] something encountered. You can’t go out and look for it. The person you marry and the person you love could easily be two different people. So have a beautiful life while waiting for God to bring along your once-in-a-lifetime love. Don't allow yourself to settle for anything less than them. Stop worrying about who you're going to marry because God's already on the front porch watching your grandchildren play.   2) God WILL give you more than you can handle, so you can learn to lean on him in times of need. He won't tempt you more than you can handle, though. So don't lose hope. Hope anchors the soul.   3) Remember who you are and where you came from. Remember that you are not from this earth. You are a child of heaven, you're invaluable, you are beautiful. Carry yourself that way.   4) Don't put your faith in humanity, humanity is inherently flawed. We are all imperfect people created and loved by a perfect God. Perfect. So put your faith in Him.   5) I fail daily, and that is why I succeed.   6) Time passes, and nothing and everything changes. Don't live life half asleep. Don't drag your soul through the days. Feel everything you do. Be there physically and mentally. Do things that make you feel this way as well.   7) Live for beauty. We all need beauty, get it where you can find it. Clothing, paintings, sculptures, music, tattoos, nature, literature, makeup. It's all art and it's what makes us human. Same as feeling the things we do. Stay human.   8) If someone makes you think, keep them. If someone makes you feel, keep them.   9) There is nothing the human brain cannot do. You can change anything about yourself that you want to. Fight for it. It's all a mental game.   10) God didn’t break our chains for us to be bound again. Alcohol, drugs, depression, addiction, toxic relationships, monotony and repetition, they bind us. Break those chains. Destroy your past and give yourself new life like God has given you.   11) This is your life. Your struggle, your happiness, your sorrow, and your success. You do not need to justify yourself to anyone. You owe no one an explanation for the choices that you make and the position you are in. In the same vein, respect yourself by not comparing your journey to anyone else's.   12) There is no wrong way to feel.   13) Knowledge is everywhere, keep your eyes open. Look at how diverse and wonderful this world is. Are you going to miss out on beautiful people, places, experiences, and ideas because you are close-minded? I sure hope not.   14) Selfless actions always benefit you more than the recipient.   15) There is really no room for regret in this life. Everything happens for a reason. If you can't find that reason, accept there is one and move on.   16) There is room, however, for guilt. Resolve everything when it first comes up. That's not only having integrity, but also taking care of your emotional well-being.   17) If the question is ‘Am I strong enough for this?’ The answer is always, ‘Yes, but not on your own.’   18) Mental health and sanity above all.   19) We love because He first loved us. The capacity to love is the ultimate gift, the ultimate passion, euphoria, and satisfaction. We have all of that because He first loved us. If you think about it in those terms, it is easy to love Him. Just by thinking of how much He loves us.   20) From destruction comes creation. Beauty will rise from the ashes.   21) Many things can cause depression. Such as knowing you aren't becoming the person you have the potential to become. Choose happiness and change. The sooner the better, and the easier.   22) Half of happiness is as simple as eating right and exercising. You are one big chemical reaction. So are your emotions. Give your body the right reactants to work with and you'll be satisfied with the products.

You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. But because they believe themselves to be white, they would rather countenance a man choked to death on film under their laws. And they would rather subscribe to the myth of Trayvon Martin, slight teenager, hands full of candy and soft drinks, transforming into a murderous juggernaut. And they would rather see Prince Jones followed by a bad cop through three jurisdictions and shot down for acting like a human. And they would rather reach out, in all their sanity, and push my four-year-old son as though he were merely an obstacle in the path of their too-important day.

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that. “Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

Insomnia , at times hits you like a cannonball , Breaking every wall of your estranged mind and making you loose your “ sanity “ ! You have been trying to befriend the demons , feeding on your fears , But, Some nights, would just last for ever with no end in sight, Some nights are just cold . And you remind yourself that you are an “ invisible “ hero; And wait for the daybreak .

Twelve-step programs are rife with mottoes that people repeat solemnly as if rhyming, repetition, and puns are the equivalent of wisdom. Nothing changes if nothing changes. Come for the vanity, stay for the sanity. If you hang around the hardware store, you’re going to eventually buy a hammer. If I may, I’d like to pitch a few more twelve-step slogans to the worldwide fellowship: Hogs log, get out and jog! (IT HAS TO MAKE SENSE? Oh, okay—I thought wisdom was more about rhyming!) If I’m not calling, I’m stalling, and that leads to bawling and hauling. Drugs and ass got me here, but free coffee gave me a ride home. Booze is dumb and I’m no dummy! So how do I reconcile my atheist hypocrisy while still attending these groups? My favorite twelve-step slogan is Take what you want and leave the rest. This one slogan is how I’m able to rationalize my attendance and constant rule-breaking. And,

You’ve probably also noted the impacts of virtual distraction on your own and others’ behaviors: memory loss, inability to concentrate, being asked to repeat what you just said, miscommunication the norm, getting lost online and wasting time you don’t have, withdrawing from the real world. The list of what’s being lost is a description of our best human capacities—memory, meaning, relating, thinking, learning, caring. There is no denying the damage that’s been done to humans as technology took over—our own Progress Trap. The impact on children’s behavior is of greatest concern for its present and future implications. Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, a highly skilled physician in rehabilitation, is author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. He describes our children’s behavior in ways that I notice in my younger grandchildren: “We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.”17 These very disturbing behaviors are not just emotional childish reactions. Our children are behaving as addicts deprived of their drug. Brain imaging studies show that technology stimulates brains just like cocaine does.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no set rules in life. You do what you have to do to survive. If that means running away from the love of your life to preserve your sanity, you do it. If it means breaking someone’s heart so yours doesn’t break; do it. Life is complicated — too much so for there to be absolutes. We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you’ll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves.

To have been raised on the streets, you have an amazing vocabulary.” “I have my sister Tessa to thank. Unlike me and my other two sisters, she liked to insult people so that they didn’t realize she was being cruel. Hence Kasen’s favorite phrase, ‘I’m gonna break Tess on your ass and call you names you’ll have to look up in order to be offended.’ ” She laughed in spite of the danger. “Your sisters sound… interesting.” “That’s a polite way of saying they’re all effing nuts. But it’s okay. Sanity waved good-bye to me a long time ago too.” The

The path of a high tier sorceress was risky. On certain nights, Amonette found herself courting a stress that would break any normal human. Even with the spellwork she wove to bolster her frame, she was barely able to keep herself together, always teetering on the edge of sanity. Vain as it sounded, she would do well to establish some type of human bond. The light from the candles cast long shadows on the wooden walls as the compounds from them activated: jasmine, myrrh, cinnamon, and scents from trees indigenous to the Mersi forest— Hamallallia branches and flowers from the Asmodean Drachla. As Amonette waited for the composite fragrance to fill the room, she heaved her dress over her head, feeling the numbness setting into her muscles. It's about time to begin, she thought. Amonette shivered slightly against the cold breeze nipping at her naked, ever desensitizing flesh. The light was just bright enough to reveal the sigils snaking the length of her stomach and torso-- lines carved into her flesh in moments when the spirit of Satharchon occupied her entirely. She was his most loyal, and hence she was blessed to hear his voice in her head on occasion, counseling her. She hoped he would find her entire body fit to occupy tonight.

For a detained patriot, breaking through the doubled walls of gray silence, attempting even a symbolic link with the outside world, is an act of resistance And resistance--even at the level of merely asserting one's rights, of maintaining one's ideological beliefs in the face of a programmed onslaught--is in fact the only way political prisoners can maintain their sanity and humanity. Resistance is the only means of trying to prevent a breakdown. The difficulty lies in the fact that in this effort one must rely first and foremost on one's own resources (writing defiance on toilet paper for instance), and nobody can teach one how to do it.

Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge—in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no set rules in life. You do what you have to do to survive. If that means running away from the love of your life to preserve your sanity, you do it. If it means breaking someone’s heart so yours doesn’t break; do it. Life is complicated — too much so for there to be absolutes. We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you’ll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves. Olivia has stopped rattling quite as much as she used to. Love is a God-given tool, she tells me. It screws things back in place that were loose, and it cleans out all the broken pieces that you don’t need anymore.

They later adopted the term “psychopath,” used in the lay press as early as 1885 in William Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette, which described it as a “new malady” and stated, “Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.” Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.” People exhibiting this purest form of the disorder would become known, in the jargon of psychiatry, as “Cleckley” psychopaths.

Life can be cruel and hard at times learn to take breaks from everyone and everything. You must in order to save your sanity. It’s your journey and only you will know when that time is upon you.

Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good—a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature—the value which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn, and as happy as a child.

This move is called triangulation. Jan’s claim that I was “depressed”, and she was “worried” about me were meant to make me worry that perhaps I wasn’t feeling quite right. Narcissists love making their partners or family members question their own sanity. It puts the narcissist right in the driver’s seat and makes them look like a saint for being concerned in the first place.

Someone who gaslights another person, such as a child, partner, or family member, wants to make that person question their sanity, memories, or perception of reality. Like Gregory playing with the lights or making objects disappear, it’s a ploy to make a person feel powerless in the world and their relationship. A successful attempt at gaslighting ends with one person telling the other what’s real, what their opinion should be, and what they remember. Let someone gaslight you long enough, and you’ll atrophy into a kind of zombie bumping around in the world.

The only way to reliably feel best is by learning to sit with feelings, even if they are painful. No matter who is around, you can never break up with your emotions. That’s a good thing, since they have a lot to teach us.

Being with her was almost like drowning, constantly being pulled back in despite your best efforts, never managing to break through the surface of sanity. Except if I was to die drowning in her, it would be the most beautiful death, the kind that left you feeling the rest of your life was worth something as long as she was in it, if only for a brief moment.

Handcrafted Humanity Sonnet 7 Give, give and give again, To give without reserve is living. Fall, fall and fall again, To fall without stopping is rising. Break, break and break again, To break without bending is integrity. Lose, lose and lose again, To lose without submitting is victory. Love, love and love again, To love despite being fooled is sanity. Help, help and help again, To help despite being deceived is humanity. To give is to live, that is the civilized normal. Kindness alone sets the human apart from animal.

I want to clarify that gaslighting is abuse. It is an emotional and psychological beating that can leave a victim scarred and uncertain of their own reality for years to come. I don’t want you to fall into or stay in the terrible cycle of gaslighting because it can do horrible things to your stress level, fear, anxiety, and sanity.

I couldn't read, and it had almost killed me. I hadn't even won properly. I sank to my knees, letting the platform carry me, and covered my face in my shaking hands. Tears burned just before pain seared through my left arm. I would never beat the third task. I would never free Tamlin, or his people. The pain shot through my bones again, and through my increasing hysteria, I heard words inside my head that stopped me short. Don't let her see you cry. Put your hands at your sides and stand up. I couldn't. I couldn't move. Stand. Don't give her the satisfaction of seeing you break. My knees and spine, not entirely of my own will, forced me upright, and when the ground at last stopped moving, I looked at Amarantha with tearless eyes. Good, Rhysand told me. Stare her down. No tears- wait until you're back in your cell. Amarantha's face was drawn and white, her black eyes like onyx as she beheld me. I had won, but I should be dead. I should be squashed, my blood oozing everywhere. Count to ten. Don't look at Tamlin. Just stare at her. I obeyed. It was the only thing that kept me from giving in to the sobs trapped within my chest, thundering to get out. I willed myself to meet Amarantha's gaze. It was cold and vast and full of ancient malice, but I held it. I counted to ten. Good girl. Now walk away. Turn on your heel- good. Walk toward the door. Keep your chin high. Let the crowd part. One step after another. I listened to him, let him keep me tethered to sanity as I was escorted back to my cell by the guards-who still kept their distance. Rhysand's words echoed through my mind, holding me together. But when my cell door closed, he went silent, and I dropped to the floor and wept.

I shouted over the music, 'I don't need a keeper"' I wanted to spin and spin and spin. 'No, you don't,' Tamlin said, never once stumbling over his playing. How his bow did dance upon the strings, his fingers sturdy and strong, no sign of those claws that I had come to stop fearing... 'Dance, Feyre,' he whispered. So I did. I was loosened, a top whirling around and around, and I didn't know who I danced with or what they looked like, only that I had become the music and the fire and the night, and there was nothing that could slow me down. Through it all, Tamlin and his musicians played such joyous music that I didn't think the world could contain it all. I sashayed over to him, my faerie lord, my protector and warrior, my friend, and danced before him. He grinned at me, and I didn't break my dancing as he rose from his seat and knelt before me in the grass, offering up a solo on his fiddle to me. Music just for me- a gift. He played on, his fingers fast and hard upon the strings of his fiddle. My body slithering like a snake, I tipped my head back to the heavens and let Tamlin's music fill all of me. There was a pressure at my waist and I was swept away in someone's arms as they whisked me back into the ring of dancing. I laughed so hard I thought I'd combust, and when I opened my eyes, I found Tamlin there, spinning me round and round. Everything became a blur of colour and sound, and he was the only object in it, tethering me to sanity, to my body, which glowed and burned in every place he touched. I was filled with sunshine. It was like I'd never experienced summer before, like I'd never known who was waiting to emerge from that forest of ice and snow. I didn't want it to end- I never wanted to leave this hilltop.

Lidia lifted her chin. “Will you be amenable to assisting me?” Irithys glanced down at herself, as if she could see the small band of tattoos around her throat. A halo of sorts—inked on the Sprite Queen by an imperial hag to keep her power in check. The queen’s gesture was a silent question. Rigelus said, “The ink remains. You can wield enough of your powers to prove useful.” Lidia kept quiet. Let Irithys study her. She’d been kept down here more than a century. Had not seen daylight or left that crystal bubble in all that time. There was a good chance that behind the glimmering eyes, the queen had gone mad. But Lidia didn’t need her sanity. She could do the thinking for the two of them. Irithys’s chin dipped slightly. Rigelus turned to Lidia. “You have a week with her.” Lidia held the sprite’s blazing stare, let her see the cold fire within her own soul. “Breaking Athalar won’t take that long.

Maybe the sounds are coming from within his head. Like the teeth cracking off of the gears in his mind, as his sanity begins to break down.

It occurred to Bo that Texas songs were always about the sky because there simply wasn't anything else. No hill, no mound, not even a ripple of earth to break the dizzying sweep of the eye toward infinity. “Flat,” she decided, was a term insufficient to the terrain. It was more than that. It was actually a negative pull, an inverted gasp of ground beneath a firmament so boundless it might threaten the sanity of even those who weren't already pushing the edge.

My sanity felt like it was hanging over a pit, dangling on a frayed string that I knew was going to break - it was only a matter of when.

Here the dialogue form breaks down. From the believer’s mouth there emerges what can only be called a soup of words, sentences that begin and do not end, words that change into something else halfway. This goes on for a longer or shorter time.

Kryptonite. I love their smell, their taste, the sounds they make when they come inside of me. But between a full-time job, law school, hours of reading cases, and study groups, I barely have time to sleep, much less date. Which is why I gave them up. “Which floor?” His upper crust Brit accent curls around my spine, making mush out of me. “Uh, nine.” I reach across to press the ‘9’ button, and a whiff of his scent reaches me—expensive cologne, clean soap, and a base note I suspect is just him. My legs, already wobbly from the mad dash from the Metro, turn to Jell-O. Damn! No wonder women stuff panties in his pockets. The man is pure sex on a stick. If anybody could tempt me to break my no-screwing-men vow, yeah, it would be Gabriel Storm. The door closes and someone coughs, alerting me to the other people in the elevator. Hoping no one noticed my temporary lapse of sanity, I look behind me. Only blank expressions greet me. Thank God. It won’t do for a rumor to spread around the office that I’ve been caught drooling over the COO of the company we are negotiating against. No one would take me seriously after that. I do the polite thing and wish good morning all around, get back a couple of nods before the car reaches the second floor, site of my law firm’s cafeteria. As soon as the door opens, the smell of cinnamon drifts into the car. Stuffed French toast day. Knowing what’s coming, I step to the side to avoid the stampede. Not that I blame them. With a limited supply of the delicious treat, it’s every employee for himself. When the doors slide shut, Gabriel Storm and I are the sole occupants in the car. For seven floors,

She wet her lips, clenching her fists against my shoulders. “Im afraid of giving you control again. And, I’m afraid of how I’ll react, but I want it. It is what it is.” I can be reasonable, but you need to stop considering the impossible. You can’t go home, you can’t escape, and I can’t let you go. It is what it is. How dare she use those words against me? My anger swelled, vibrating through my muscles, but Rose didn’t move-she didn’t even look worried. Her head shook slightly, then she pressed her lips against mine. Coaxing me past the anger, and back to sanity. I felt like a hundred pound weight sat on my chest by the time she finished. “Where’d all that come from?” She dragged her hand through her hair. “I figured it was about time I give you a little reminder that I’m not so easily broken. Whatever it is you need, I’m game-I do like… watching you. The look you get when you’re up to no good and can’t hold back. I could get off on that.” With a nervous giggle, she dropped her hear forward, her hair creating a curtain around her face. I brushed it back, then pushed her to the floor again, pinning her under me. "God, I love you.

And fuck me, that little habit of hers will be the death of my sanity. I want to be the one tearing into her skin, maybe even breaking it so I can see her bleed just a little. I bet it would be the prettiest shade of red.

The shock of the concussion breaks blood vessels in the eyes and they turn red causing blurred, foggy vision. Your senses are taken away and you lose control of your muscles and sphincters. Your nervous system is assaulted so violently nerve impulses are scattered and your brain receives nothing but nervous nonsense. Your heart and lungs are left stunned momentarily without guidance from your brain. Your heart beat goes irregular and you lose consciousness in spurts of blackness only to return quickly to the horror. The physical pain from the concussion is like falling from ten or fifteen feet and hitting concrete. And it won’t stop. It just goes on and on and gets worse as you cry, cuss, beg. and pray. Defend yourself? Forget it. Rhodes and his Marines just tried to hold on to life and sanity. After a while

. . . we can recognize two distinct selves in us: the imaginary self with its tendencies and desires - and the real self. There are imaginary sadists and masochists, persons of violent imagination. At each moment our imaginary self breaks in pieces and disappears at contact with reality, yielding its place to the real self. For the real and the imaginary cannot coexist by their very nature. It is a matter of two types of objects, of feelings and actions that are completely irreducible. [Sartre, Psychology of Imagination (1950, pp. 165-6)]

She rubbed her brows again. “There is this … rage,” she said hoarsely. “This despair and hatred and rage that lives and breathes inside me. There is no sanity to it, no gentleness. It is a monster dwelling under my skin. For the past ten years, I have worked every day, every hour, to keep that monster locked up. And the moment I talk about those two days, and what happened before and after, that monster is going to break loose, and there will be no accounting for what I do.

Every moment I question the rules we play by that keep us confined by our loneliness and (for many) imprisoned by meds. What possibilities lie dormant or stuffed away? What could it look like if we claimed our own personal truth, our own personal definitions of integrity, and our freedom to break unnecessary societal rules for our own sanity?

Sanity and insanity were not opposites but rather were the two faces of inanimate matter, the point at which the existence of consciousness can get no further in breaking down the existence of substance, of the body. Art, rooted in insanity, transforms itself through process into sanity: it is matter, the body, that is insane.

All creation is an act of madness, a subtle insanity unmasking ourselves in order to break mirrors, telepathic accidents in dissent of the known.

Strike, who had met countless rootless and neglected children during his rackety, unstable childhood, recognized in Billy’s imploring expression a last plea to the adult world, to do what grown-ups were meant to do, and impose order on chaos, substitute sanity for brutality. Face to face, he felt a strange kinship with the emaciated, shaven-headed psychiatric patient, because he recognized the same craving for order in himself. In his case, it had led him to the official side of the desk, but perhaps the only difference between the two of them was that Strike’s mother had lived long enough, and loved him well enough, to stop him breaking when life threw terrible things at him.

Civil Discourse (The Sonnet) Be a friend to the just, But a parent to the unjust. There is no place for hate, Restrain the hater, but do not hurt. The paradigm of revolution needs reform, We must make it grow out of cruelty, For cruelty is not the cure for cruelty, We must treat it with the light of sanity. It is a sad state of affairs when, Violence becomes a part of civil discourse. How can we possibly call ourselves civilized, If mere disagreement breaks out into violent uproars! So I repeat, cruelty is not the answer to cruelty. Work to destroy hate without destroying the human spirit.

but now I feel like I'm clinging to the blurring edges of sanity, that elusive, fair-weather friend always breaking my heart

Guilt only disappears when we are made right with God. When we break the laws of God we incur real guilt. The only remedy I know for real guilt is real forgiveness. The price tag for real forgiveness is real repentance. R.C. Sproul, What Can I Do with My Guilt?

Love is poetry of the cosmos, Love is constitution supreme. Breaking all comatose sanity, Love dawns consciousness supreme.

Waterhouse seeks happiness. He achieves it by breaking Nip code systems and playing the pipe organ. But since pipe organs are in short supply, his happiness level ends up being totally dependent on breaking codes. He cannot break codes (hence, cannot be happy) unless his mind is clear. Now suppose that mental clarity is designated by Cm, which is normalized, or calibrated, in such a way that it is always the case that where Cm = 0 indicates a totally clouded mind and Cm = 1 is Godlike clarity—an unattainable divine state of infinite intelligence. If the number of messages Waterhouse decrypts, in a given day, is designated by Ndecrypts, then it will be governed by Cm in roughly the following way: Clarity of mind (Cm) is affected by any number of factors, but by far the most important is horniness, which might be designated by σ, for obvious anatomical reasons that Waterhouse finds amusing at this stage of his emotional development. Horniness begins at zero at time t = t0 (immediately following ejaculation) and increases from there as a linear function of time: The only way to drop it back to zero is to arrange another ejaculation. There is a critical threshold σc such that when σ > σc it becomes impossible for Waterhouse to concentrate on anything, or, approximately, which amounts to saying that the moment σ rises above the threshold σc it becomes totally impossible for Waterhouse to break Nipponese cryptographic systems. This makes it impossible for him to achieve happiness (unless there is a pipe organ handy, which there isn’t). Typically, it takes two to three days for σ to climb above σc after an ejaculation: Critical, then, to the maintenance of Waterhouse’s sanity is the ability to ejaculate every two to three days. As long as he can arrange this, σ exhibits a classic sawtooth-wave pattern, optimally with the peaks at or near σc [see below] wherein the grey zones represent periods during which he is completely useless to the war effort. So much for the basic theory.

So, in the name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the end of the journey. Let death come upon us planting our cabbages, or on horseback, or let us steal away to some cottage and there let strangers close our eyes, for a servant sobbing or the touch of a hand would break us down. Best of all, let death find us at our usual occupations, among girls and good fellows who make no protests, no lamentations; let him find us "parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties, entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux". But enough of death; it is life that matters.

It was then that I realized what a tangible thing sanity is. To those who have never had theirs challenged, sanity’s invisible, just a variable that is never truly appreciated except when they’re forced to face its absence in a crowded subway car, or in an emergency room. You only understand it when it’s crumbling away and the barriers are breaking. You can feel it slipping through your fingers like sand, you know it’s happening but you can only watch, an observer watching the negative of life’s film drained of all its color.

For me, as an Inner Alchemist, there is no body and soul; the body and the soul are one indivisible thing. The soul then IS the body in a certain vibrational range. As such, there is no Out There or In Here for an Alchemist. Duality and separation are a good way to teach at first, they help to create demarcations that can certainly help to maintain a type of sanity in a young mind, but they are illusions that must be left behind as the intellect grows.

first learned this lesson from Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history at Harvard University. When you take a class with Roberts, your initial assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. No checking email or social media; no quick runs to Starbucks. (She reluctantly concedes that bathroom breaks are allowed.) When I told a friend I planned to visit Harvard to meet Roberts, and to undertake the painting-viewing exercise myself, he gave me a look that mixed admiration with fear for my sanity, as though I’d announced an intention to kayak the Amazon alone. And he wasn’t entirely wrong to worry about my mental health.

It turns out, though, that all kids are still kids, even if they’re homeschooled. They bicker and squabble. They “forget” and “lose”—both intentionally and unintentionally—schoolwork, books, chores, and assignments. Like other kids—and adults, too—they like to get their own way. They cry and fuss and get angry. They break things, spill things, drop things, and generally interrupt the flow of the day with accidents. They have a hard time cleaning their rooms. They are persons.

It is not a lover's job to make sense, Lover's role is to humanize all senses. Role of animal senses is to stay contained, Role of human senses is to extend themselves. To sense the sense is nonsense, To sense nonsense is ultimate sense of all. This is possible only when you are lost, This is possible only when you are in love. All five senses are of no worth, If you don't have that one sense, the sense of love. Sense yourself till you sense nothing but love. Break yourself till each crack reflects the infinity of the heart. Each of us is an explorer of infinity, Yet we are trapped in vain by insecurity. Wake up to love and you'll see, all cages are fiction, cooked up by knee-deep sanity.

Everyone tells you an email list is important. You know that already. But it’s a struggle knowing what exactly to send your subscribers, isn’t it? In this post, I break down 16 email archetypes that you can send your email list.

when they find out you have aq mental illness, they'll treat you like glass and anticipate you breaking at any given moment. they'll measure their words with a pinch of fear being careful not to overrun your tiny trembling cup of sanity.

I thought again of what it must be like to be torn from everything you’d ever known, into a world that didn’t follow any of the same rules, didn’t even have the same standards of living you’d grown up with. To have no contact with friends, family, or enemies. To be completely cut off from all of it. How did her sanity remain intact? How did her heart not break? The strangest desire overcame me, to reach out and offer comfort.

The sound of her mother’s voice will break the glasshouse she has built around herself, a space devoid (of melodrama, of madness) ~ she’d rather go about doing her yogic routines.

Sometimes I can even read you as well as you read me. You have no idea what you’re doing half the time. You have no idea who you are.” Perhaps not, Shea, but I know you are my lifemate. I could not harm you now. His face remained granite, his eyes dark and ice cold. She was right. He was dangerous. He knew it in his soul. His mind was not to be trusted. Her presence kept him tranquil, calm, but his mind was a maze of dark, deadly trails. He had no idea I he would be able to distinguish reality from nightmare if their delicately balanced world tilted in any way. His black eyes went a glittering obsidian, and he looked away from her, ashamed. He should allow her to leave, give her her freedom, but he could not. She was his only sanity his only path to the surface from the hellish nightmare he lived in. I have sworn to protect you, Shea. I can only promise it is in my heart to do so. Shea stepped away from the bed, suddenly close to tears. He was in a treacherous labyrinth; he walked a fine line between sanity and a world she did not want to try to comprehend. “I will protect you, Jacques. You have my solemn word, I won’t let you down. I’ll see you through this until you’re right again.” And then? His black gaze slid lazily over her. Do you intend to leave me, Shea? You save me, and then you think to desert me? There was a kind of dark humor in his voice, a secret amusement that stirred something in her she hadn’t known existed. Something that went beyond fear. Terror. Her chin tilted a little belligerently. “What does that mean? Of course I won’t desert you. I’ll stay with you and see you through this. We’ll find your family.” It was too late. Even if she attempted to put distance between them, she could not break their bond. His blood ran in her veins; his mind was familiar with the path to hers. Their souls called to one another. Hearts were following, and it was only matter of time before he possessed her body. Running would not save either of them. Jacques knew it with a certainty with which he knew few other things. But imparting the knowledge to her would frighten her more. His heart twisted, a funny somersault. His Shea feared death far less than she feared personal commitment. She really had no idea they were already bound together. She would need him, need him close, need him touching her in her mind, in her body. I feel your need to perform the human functions you seem to enjoy. Go bathe. I am in no hurry to have you examine my wounds.

He had begun to break me. I felt responsible for his happiness and sanity.

Have you ever felt that love is the most stupid thing in the world?” He smiled. “All the time.” “Why don’t they teach that in school? Emotional Safety 101. How to love without losing your sanity. Instead of people running around claiming they feel it, while not knowing what to do with it, how to handle it, how not to break it, how to keep it whole. It’s a terribly dangerous thing in the wrong hands.

Heavy heart Every day a war zone. You're constantly fighting for your own sanity in search of your own peace. Smiling instead of crying. Laughing instead of breaking down. You deserve a break. This night is yours. Tonight your heavy heart deserves the light.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no set rules in life. You do what you have to do to survive. If that means running away from the love of your life to preserve your sanity, you do it. If it means breaking someone’s heart so yours doesn’t break, do it. Life is complicated—too much so for there to be absolutes. We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around, and you’ll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves.

If friends take advantage repeatedly and we return for more, we must take a break from the friendship. If we trust our kids to do certain things and they break that trust over and over, we know that they aren’t trustworthy yet, so we must take charge and stop putting faith in them for things that they cannot yet deliver.

A certified, bona fide nutcase': Although he was indeed someone, he believed that he was more of a nut than a man. He just needed somebody to break him, to make him lovelier, but that somebody had to be even nuttier.

But most importantly, we need to remember that whenever we pursue money and material gains there is a cost. When we work very long hours outside our homes (and inside as well, but that doesn’t generate income and that’s what we’re focusing on here) we take something away from our families. Many times we must work so hard and long because we need to put food on the table. Other times we must because we will lose our minds if we don’t have a break from the stresses of home. But we must always be careful to weigh the cost and benefits and feel comfortable that we are striking a balance. This is extremely hard because making money and having a job or career is emotionally complex and can be a large part of a woman’s identity. Still, we must get past this so that we never lose sight of what is lasting and what is fleeting.