“No matter the circumstances, I promise you: You are not difficult or broken or bad at being creative. You might just be a fern in need of some shade.”

“When you think, sense, use language, or process meaning differently than others, it’s easy to forget that your ways are objectively as valuable as the more normative ones.”

“The more my self-belief depends on an external, inflexible circumstance, the more anxiously I remain attached to it.”

“A healthy relationship to publishing and sharing our creative work doesn’t get to define our creative work entirely.”

“There is so much creativity that takes place outside the physical act of making. And it’s the work of those quiet, private moments that so often leads to the big, visible revelations and breakthroughs.”

“It is in direct relationship where you will build your most reliable self-trust, where things that are hard to believe will slowly start to feel less pretend and more apparent.”

“Discipline: the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience. From Middle English, carrying the sense of mortification by scourging oneself.

Um, is this what we really want to be?”

“That critical, hesitant voice you sometimes hear? The one that bellows from a deep, familiar place inside you—it might not be your actual voice. It might not even belong to you.”