"What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Don't worry if you only go in circles in the beginning, it's not like you know where you're headed yet anyway. Your only job is to remain in motion and trust that you'll know soon enough if you're going the wrong direction.
You're going to get your rhythm. You will. You'll suddenly find yourself further than you were before with half the effort and a touch less fear. You'll get stronger. It will get fun again.
“Here I am, this is me
And I'm stronger than you ever thought I'd be
Are you shocked? Are you mad?
That you're missing out on who I really am…”
“Now it looks like the joke's on you
'Cause, the girl that you thought you knew…”
“She's so gone (she's so gone)
That's so over now
She's so gone (she's so gone)
You won't find her around
You can look but you won't see
The girl I used to be…”
Coming to terms with the fact I decide my own fate, I don’t need a man to tell me what to do. If a man wants to join me and be my partner in life so be it, but to the men who’ve never understood this, and have tried to take control, dismiss me, and change me: I’m done trying to make you love and want me. The only man I answer to now is God.
Have some fire. Be unstoppable. Be a force of nature. Be better than anyone here, and don't give a damn what anyone thinks. There are no teams here, no buddies. You're on your own. Be on your own.
“Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost,--and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement.”
“Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”