One thing I’ve really learned over the last few years is that, as important as support and help are, so are recognition and validation of what we’re going through. To feel like someone understands how we feel can ward off the intense isolation that can come hand in hand with mental illness. To have our struggles dismissed is sometimes even worse than them being ignored altogether.

In a continuation of this series, here are some quotes that validated my feelings and helped me feel understood. I hope they can do the same for you.

“I’m afraid I’ll be a book that no one reads. Music that no one listens to anymore. I’m afraid I’ll be abandoned like a movie playing in an empty theatre.” – Tablo

“We are all museums of fear.” – Charles Bukowski

“I exist too much, I feel too much, think too much. Reality is crushing the life out of me.” – David Jones

“I’m really afraid to feel happy because it never lasts.” – Andy Warhol

“Have you ever had to get through a day, smiling at people, talking, as if everything were normal and okay, while all the time you felt like you were carrying a leaden weight of unhappiness inside you?” – Elizabeth Wurtzel

“I get it now. I get it. The things that you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end.” – John Green

“I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.” – Ray Bradbury

“The truth is, I pretend to be a cynic, but I am really a dreamer who is terrified of wanting something she may never get.” – Joanna Hoffman

“The incredible pain returns again and again and again.” – Susan Sontag

“I can only connect deeply or not at all.” – Anais Nin

 “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” – Jonathan Safran Foer

“I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.” – Margaret Atwood

“That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.” – John Green

“I need to be alone for certain periods of time or I violate my own rhythm.” – Lee Krasner

“I am deathly afraid of almosts. Of coming so very close to where I want to be in life that I can almost taste it, almost touch it, then falling just a little short.” – Beau Taplin

“I’m just dying to say, ‘Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?’ or ‘Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?’ But you can’t say that at a cocktail party.” – Paul Gilmartin

“It’s all too much and not enough at the same time.” – Jack Kerouac

“She felt everything too deeply, it was like the world was too much for her.” – Joyce Maynard

“Even if you know what’s coming, you’re never prepared for how it feels.” – Natalie Standiford

“The sadness will last forever.” – Vincent Van Gogh

“How do we forgive ourselves for all of the things we did not become?” – David ‘Doc’ Luben

“There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.” – Sylvia Plath

“No one warns you about the amount of mourning in growth.” – Té V. Smith

“I am half agony, half hope.” – Jane Austen