Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

There's no better way to process pain than to write.

People who keep journals have life twice

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations.

Turning feelings into words can help us process and overcome adversity.

I hit 'record' whenever I'm going through a really hard time. I don't listen to it for a couple of days, so I have some perspective. If it's too personal to share, and I feel like would alienate the listeners, then I usually don't share that stuff.

It would be presumptuous to say writing a book would be a sufficient gesture, but if people were more preoccupied with the past, maybe the events that overwhelm us would be fewer.

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

You can see neurosis from below - as a sickness - as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

Forgiveness is a very personal and intimate thing. Forgiveness is not something that you can speak for others because it includes not only your desire and will, your reflection and intellect, but also your emotions.

In my sobriety, I have discovered that the people I love, and who hurt me, were sick like me.

An exchange of empathy provides an entry point for a lot of people to see what healing feels like.

We only learn at the speed of pain, and we don't have others in our lives without forgiveness.

Forgiveness takes time. It is the last step of the grieving process.

I lost a brother and a sister, and I came down with rheumatic fever.

I lost my son in late 2011. He had been totally incapacitated from his neck down for the last eight years of his life, but his mind was alive and brilliant in those years. He even wrote a book, 'Allegheny Mountain,' lying at home in his hospital bed.

When you listen with memory, you have an old agenda, and when you listen with desire, you have a new one. You can't listen to the other person if your agenda is overtaking you.

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

It's like my garden, love. Everything grows. Including love. And with that growing everyday how can you expect missing her to ever fade away? Everything builds, including our ability to cope with it. That's how we keep going.

Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.

Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.

While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.

In deep self acceptance, grows a compassionate understanding.