• learning to be a good friend/partner
• healing from depression, failures or heartbreak
• becoming amazing at an art or skill
• overcoming anxiety, insecurities and low body image
• overcoming the need to isolate yourself
• changing self-hating thoughts to kinder ones
• making a real connection with someone
• overcoming self-defeating and self-sabotaging thoughts
• learning how to study effectively
• finding a sense of stability and calmness at your core
• quitting habits or addictions
• leaving people and behaviours that turn you into the worst version of yourself
• getting used to healthier coping mechanisms & mindsets that feel fake
• treating yourself like you truly care about yourself
• becoming the person you always wanted to be

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.”