“Things to do today:1) Breathe in.2) Breathe out.”

“Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”

“Because there's so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.”

“I wanted to tell people, "My depression is acting up today" as an excuse for not seeing them, but I never managed to pull it off.”

“It’s a huge thing, this Shift, just as big as I imagined. My brain doesn’t want to think anymore; all of a sudden it wants to do.”

“the party line is that some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle, but i think they do it to make us feel important”

“No," mom says, looking at me in the eyes. "What's a triumph is that you woke up this morning and decided to LIVE. THAT'S a triumph. that's what you did today.”