Following along in the vein of this post, where I talked about an important inspirational quote that I use nearly constantly to remind myself that I am progressing with my writing is the following.
I was going through a Google image search looking for random inspirational quotes to put into my Facebook feed when I ran across this one:
I was immediately completely overwhelmed with emotion and started crying right then and there. The truth is, I cry a lot. For a long time, I hated that about myself. I, of course, hate how I look when I cry and how I feel while I’m crying, but the thing that really bothered me was always how I worried how it made the people around me feel. How people immediately go into ‘Oh, what’s wrong.’ or ‘Don’t cry.’ And so I had, over the years, internalized that crying was bad, or wrong, or something to be fixed.
After I saw this quote, I made a rather abrupt mental shift. I began to tell myself that it was okay to cry because that meant I needed to cry, and that helped me stop feeling guilty about crying. I also made the decision that I was no longer going to apologize for crying in front of other people. (I still avoid crying in public, I’m talking about crying in front of friends and family.) The apologizing itself was like an admittance that what I was doing was bad or wrong. Instead, I move on with the conversation without drawing attention to the crying itself, and then I thank the person for supporting me.
And truthfully, I haven’t looked at this quote since I posted it to my Facebook. It was a strong enough influence that one time that it stuck with me. Do you have a quote or other experience that has immediately and drastically changed the way that you respond to the world? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
