The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity.
Elizabeth WurtzelRead
Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel.
Interpretation
Being hypersensitive may seem honest, but can lead to emotional numbness.
The quote expresses the irony of hypersensitivity, suggesting that while it may feel more authentic to experience emotions deeply, it can paradoxically culminate in a lack of genuine feelings. When every emotion is felt to the same extreme, the individual loses the ability to discern or appreciate the nuances of their experiences, ultimately leading to a muted emotional life.
In practice
In a mental health workshop discussing the balance of emotions.
The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity.
The men have piled up in my past, have fallen trenchantly through my life, like an avalanche that doesn't mean to kill but is going to bury me alive just the same.
Whenever I talk to anyone I care about, I am always seeking approval. There is always a pleading lilt in my voice that demands love. Even the people I work with, the ones I am supposed to have a professional relationship with, all business, get pulled into my need. I can't help it. I want to be adored.
Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of ‘keeping away from the dope.’ But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?
It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.
But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.
It's very hard to live with yourself if you don't stick with your moral code.
I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences.
Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.
A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth.
But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?" "You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.