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Quote by Kristen Kehoe

“We can ask for forgiveness, from a god, from a friend, a lover, even ourselves. We can ask for forgiveness from all of the people we’ve wronged, but we can never get back the one thing we’re truly hoping to find when we asked: our innocence—the person we were before that piece of us was taken, ripped away and shattered at our feet, leaving us to learn how to pick ourselves back up and move past it.”

Quote by Kristen Kehoe

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Dropping In

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Kristen Kehoe

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“The reason why you doubt yourself so much is that you have never seen yourself in action. You have never seen yourself breaking limits. You have never seen yourself standing in the spotlight and getting cheered by the audience.”

“In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.”

“Whenever I find myself doubting whether I can face another battle, I simply remember the doubts I had in the past and how difficult the future battles seemed to be. Then, I look to where I am now and see everything I’ve faced, all the battles I won. All of them had a common element: I overcame fear rather than it overcoming me. Self-doubt, yeah, maybe, but I refuse to let that stop me. How about you do the same?”

“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.”

“You know the voice inside your head that taunts you whenever you try to be optimistic? It criticizes you when things get tough. It whines and repeats negative mantras like “You can’t do it. You’ll never be loved. You’re going to look stupid.” Let's call that voice Self-Doubt. Every negative thought you've ever had about yourself came from Self-Doubt. Whenever you focus on what Self-Doubt says, you activate the feelings those thoughts created in you. When you remember and dwell on these negative thoughts, Self-Doubt strips you of your confidence. Self-Doubt is like a manipulative man. It tries to belittle you and steal your happiness. It wants to leave you scared and insecure. The only way to silence Self-Doubt is by consciously activating another thought. In other words, remove a negative thought by replacing it with another thought.”